Dividing Iraq

Joshua Trevino makes a brief case for letting Iraq -- a country whose borders were determined and imposed by the British, not by any organic process -- separate into ethno-religious states. I don't see how this fate is to be avoided. Josh says that the West views pluralism as a moral good, when it isn't necessarily that. And anyway, not every society is capable, for whatever reasons, of maintaining a pluralist society. Now, as soon as one says this, you have people yelling, "Oh, you must be racist! You must be saying that Arabs/Muslims are incapable of democracy!" No, one would be saying that for historical, cultural and religious reasons, these Arab Muslims are incapable of (liberal, pluralistic) democracy in the present moment. Says Josh, "What is detestable is a United States Army worn down year after year interposing itself simply to keep savage men from doing savage things to the chronically ungrateful." And:

Pluralism never really had a chance in the Muslim world. There is diversity, to be sure, but it is an uneasy thing, and peace within it must be maintained by the stamp of the oppressor's boot, or the political supremacy of the non-Muslim. The former repels us, and the latter is far too tenuous to ever last. Egypt’s Copts exist at the sufferance of a suspicious and occasionally violent majority: they are the remnant of a once-thriving society of Nile Christians that ended when Nasser expelled the Greeks and other non-Muslims from Alexandria and the delta. The House of Sa’ud ruthlessly represses its eastern Shi’a. Syrian Alawites maintain power through plain brutality and fear. Iraqi Christians, having endured two genocides in the past century, and a subsquent Ba’athist cultural repression, live in quiet fear of their next ruling class. Iranian Shi'a harass and murder their Baha’i and Zoroastrian fellow-countrymen. The most obviously plural society in the region, Lebanon, was long ago reduced to a fictitious polity of borders without identity.

In this light, a unitary Iraq without an autocrat is a fool’s dream.