No worries! I was genuinely confused by your post.
Mace
there are several transition scenarios.
Any violent toppling in a revolution, yes the difference may not be large although the americans unequestionably made things much much worse in their gross naïveté and lack of good knowledge of the region, of the religion(s), etc.
There is little ethnic difference in the Libya, but it exploded from both the regional division, but also the divided and weak state apparatus.
A soft transition, of mere “decapitating” the state with a coup type transfer we can expect different results, more like the past regime changes in the Iraq itself
An internal coup (against the Clan Tikriti) and transition to more open structure is a realistic scenario that would have had I think better results where the power structure would not have fallen apart and the interests channeled.
the greatest lesson is the fast and violent transition of a dictatorship in a fragile state with still a nascent overall identity and no good traditions of the power sharing is not often successful. this is seen elsewhere outside of the middle east and the islamic world (e.g. Zaire, CAR, the south Sudan, etc.).
Knocking over Saddam and replacing him with a Shia dominated government would be just about the worst possible way possible to have a “strong counter-balance to Iran”.
In all seriousness, the Iranian government was helped out by the US invasion more than any other country in the region.
Had George Bush been a paid agent of the Mullahs I honestly am not sure sure if he could have helped them more without completely tipping his hand.
He was a paid agent for sure, just not of no a rabs.
There isn’t much more to say except that historically, partitions don’t work. Drawing a border between uncooperative groups just give them a border to fight over as well.
Of course partitions work: Look at the number of countries 100 years ago vs today: basically it has tripled from less than 65 to 196 or so.
As to the theory that people would be unhappy because of all the intermixing: a partitioned country might have 20% of the population not being in an ethnic group in control of their country vs close to 50% today.
This has little to do with partitions. This is from the decolonisation. and the post-colonial borders follow very closely the internal to the empire borders.
It is nonsense to say partition works from this (and shows ignorance of the history).
And we all know the nation known as “Iraq” with its various, often-conflicting tribal sects, has existed since the time of Alexander.
Wouldn’t want to break up a cohesive national entity that has existed for millenia.
Considering the fact that the Mullahs I was referring to aren’t Arabs but Persians that had to be one of the dumbest posts I’ve read in a long, long time.
You’re talking about the dissolution of empires, not countries. Empires are made up of former nations.
I do not think this is correct.
Geographically that is now “Iraq” has seldom if ever existed as an independent state. It has often been referred to as “Mesopotamia” in the West.
Perhaps DNA study will permit eventual precisely identification of the ancient ancestry of the modern Iraqi tribes, but if there was any Arab component before Mohammed’s death they were IIRC politically invisible, and were not numerically outstanding.
From the time of the Persian (aka Iranian- that is what they called themselves from the start) Emperor Cyrus (fl. ~550-525BCE)
what is now Iraq was under the firm overlordship of
- to ~325BCE the Persians
- Alexander and the Seleucid Diadochi for about 200 years
Then Iraq was usually occupied by whatever power ruled Persia, with Rome at times contesting.
Then after the fall of Rome the Byzantine (aka Eastern Roman) Empire filled in as Persia’s rival for control.
Then in the immediate aftermath of Mohammed’s death Iraq was conquered and became permanently dominated, demographically, by Arab speakers and the Islamic religion. There was a Seljuk Turk overlordship interlude (whose most famous leader to the West was the Kurd Saladin), and I am not sure of the ethnic identity of the post-Seljuk state rulers, but for several centuries Baghdad and Iraq were the centerpiece of Asian Arab politics and culture; Baghdad may have at times been the world’s largest and most. intellectually advanced metropolis.
The awful Mongol sack (~1250) and of Baghdad a later invasion by Tamerlaine (~1400) set the entire region back as far as the Iraqi Arabs were concerned- they increasingly became caught in the middle of the warring Ottoman Turks and the resurrected Persian state. I do not think there was an independent Asian Arab nation of significant stature until after WW2.
And say what you will of the West’s influence since then, I don’t think the native Arab rulers (i.e. Syrian, Iraq, Kuwait) can be accused of consistently acting in their countries’ best interests.
You may have noticed the last 100 years haven’t been particularly peaceful.
I don’t think you can really say that. The partition of India was violent, millions died and it caused several additional wars down the line. But now while India and Pakistan still have border skirmishes and long running disputes they have been mostly at peace since 1971, over 40 years.
India is now a stable democracy, Bangladesh has been one since 1991. Pakistan is Pakistan, but at least in name its a western ally. I don’t think you can make a strong case that the partition of India didn’t work. It paid a horrific price to get there, but 50 years later the partition has held with the same borders and the countries in question mostly get along.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
The Kurds were pretty much out of Iraq before we even invaded.
[/QUOTE]
Do you have a cite for this?? AFAIK, the Kurd’s had fled into the mountains and away from SH and his merry band, but the reason we kept the no fly zone going was because they hadn’t fled completely and weren’t pretty much out of Iraq before the invasion. I’m sure gassing them and otherwise trying to stomp them out didn’t help their population, but I don’t think they were ever gone completely from Iraq and still maintained strongholds in the north of the country until the invasion.
As for the OP, it wasn’t really considered because even as stupid as Bush was he wasn’t stupid enough to open the various cans of worms it would have opened to try and divide the country 3 ways (or even 2 ways). It would have done nothing for the US to have to deal with 3 made up governments over 1, giving the Kurd’s the northern part of the country would have alienated multiple other regional countries (even more than we already did) and caused even more strife, and there would have been no easy way in 2003/4 to divided the Sunni and Shi’a parts of the country since the populations were so intermixed…and it wouldn’t have helped with any aspect of the cluster fuck to have tried to do so, either. Bad as what we did turned out, trying to divide the country by fiat (which is how the Europeans got us all into this mess in the first place :smack:) would have been much, much worse.
I’m pretty certain he was being sarcastic.
The Arab Lakhmids ( Sassanid clients ) occupied the west bank of the Euphrates. As in Byzantine Syria ( which had there own client cognate in the Ghassanids ) there had been a steady influx of Arab tribes into the area for some time. They probably were quite not as numerically dominant in densely settled Mesopotamia as in non-urban Syria, but in a modern sense they would have controlled much of what is today western Iraq.
Overwhelmingly Turkic-Tungusic.
It had been in slow decline for some time. Centuries of over-irrigation + a general drying trend seems to have led to increased soil salination and a substantial collapse in revenue production from at least the time of the Fourth Fitna ( i.e. later Abbasids ). Add in the conversion of farmland to make more pasture-land for Turkic tribes and the Mongol eruption was just a rotten cherry on top, which badly broke a number of urban centers in addition to further damaging irrigation ( in Khurasan in particular, less so than in Mesopotamia per se ).
the Cheney-Rumsfeld camarilla deliberately avoided or ignored any advice which conflicted with their fantasy of a post-saddam utopia.
Partition - either as a solution - or a disaster to be avoided - was therefore not in the vocubalary.
The countries mostly get along? India and Pakistan have nukes pointed at each other! And even the promise of mutually assured destruction can’t stop the endless stream of terrorist acts, insurgencies, and border skirmishes.
Bangladesh is a better picture, probably because it doesn’t really have a choice, with all the nukes in the neighborhood.
Yes, but they haven’t had a major war in 40 years. Leaving India in one piece would likely have caused an even bloodier long running civil war that would have had even more deaths. Many Indian scholars argue this, that in the end Partition was better for India.
I’m sure that’s a popular opinion, especially among people who are not fond of Muslims.
Dividing a country doesn’t fix the wounds that are already there. What it does do is fix those wounds on a map, giving people something nice and concrete to fight about indefinitely.
Not partitioning doesn’t ensure that everyone will kiss and make up, of course. But it does leave the option open. The reality is people who want to fight are going to fight, and people who want to get over their difference and become a unified nation will do so. But in all of our centuries of political science, we haven’t figured out a way to force that to happen.
Or, it removes the need to.
Look, problematic as they can be, obviously borders work more than they don’t; most borders in the world do not have ongoing tension and clashes like India-Pakistan. Many borders have never seen violence since the fight that established them.