Dividing Iraq
Tuesday July 25, 2006
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...
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Advertisement
Advertisement
Search This Blog
Recent Posts
About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
Subscribe
Archives
Blogs Worth Reading
- Front Porch Republic
- The American Conservative
- Patrick Deneen
- Conventional Folly
- The American Scene
- First Things
- Andrew Sullivan
- The Plank
- Eunomia
- Get Religion
- Postmodern Conservative
- Alex Massie
- The Corner
- Contentions
- Sharon Astyk
- Barry Ritholtz
- The Oil Drum
- Mere Comments
- First Principles (ISI)
- Brian Kaller
It wasn't too long ago that Western societies, including the US, weren't really capable of the kind of liberal, pluralistic democracy that we now insist must be the norm for everyone else.
It reminds me of young college graduates who think that that have a right to *start* in life at the point where their parents *ended up* -- that they should be able to start out with the same sorts of material comforts and luxuries (two nice cars, expensive entertainment systems, nice houses, etc.) that their parents achieved after half a lifetime of working, saving, etc. We think that other societies ought to be able to *start* at the point where we have *ended up*. We tend to forget how many years -- and struggles -- it took us to get where we are, yet we think we can just go in and impose our current standard by fiat on everyone else.
It would be like finding a society that has just begun to develop the steam engine independently, and expecting them to be able to just jump in and start producing airplanes already.
Sometimes these things take time to develop. We expect them to go from A to M, when they are having enough trouble going from A to B. And we forgot how much time and effort -- and how many setbacks -- it took for us to go from A to M. Or even from A to B.>
Very, very well said, David.
It's hard to see how to encourage movement from A to M, or to B, from the outside. Would it have helped Galileo's cause if a bunch of infidel Mohammadeans had come to his defense? Probably not. So where does that leave us today??>
While I agree with your premise, David, the only flaw I see is that they're not even at A yet.
Remember, we didn't get to A until We, the people, wanted a democracy.
They aren't even to that point.
Democracy cannot be forced upon those who don't want it. Democracy is for the people...by the people.>
"they're not even at A yet.
we didn't get to A until We, the people, wanted a democracy."
Ah, I wasn't a history major, but I'm almost certain that people and societies existed before democracy happened.>
No, Tom...you're misunderstanding my point.
"A" for us was the Declaration of Independence and B the American Revolutionary war and C whatever...we have grown from A to M or whatever...passing through J (American civil war, etc) etc along the way.
The people of the Arab world haven't even gotten to A yet. They're not even on the path towards it. Y'see...we got to where we are because there were enough outspoken anti-religious and religious freedom advocates to move us in the right direction during our founding. The Arab world seems destined to wallow in their religious nutcasery and unable to move beyond it...keeping democracy and freedom at arms length.>
In other words...
There's nothing of democracy (or even hope of it) in a world where religion and the religious elite call all the shots...and the people abide and follow.>
Of course, the difficult thing in dividing Iraq is deciding who gets what. If I remember correctly, the Sunni areas of Iraq do not contain any of the oil fields.>
Allowing Iraq to fragment isn't probably a bad idea and one that I have pondered before. Look at other countries that have had different peoples 'artificially' stuck together through peace settlements and then later parted ways and are much better off as a result:
Czechoslovakia
Yugoslavia
East/West Pakistan
I am sure there are more, but that is what was right off the top of my head.
Why force them to be together if they don't want to be?>
Excuse me guys, but Crunchy Con and everyone else seems to be forgetting a pretty important factor: Turkey.
Any notion of an idependent Kurdistan means Turkey goes to war that day. Turkey would see that development as a threat to its existence.
Are CC and the aouthor of the article that he quotes that ignorant?>
Arguably, the Brits are responsible for a lot of the messes in the world today. The subcontinent of India is in the process of disintegrating back into its original (pre-colonial) 124 states (4 and counting.) Iraq was another badly-designed arrangement; so was Palestine. Maybe we should be looking at ALL of the British colonial constructions to see which ones, if any, are still viable.>
I agree that dividing Iraq 3 ways, between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, is a good idea, and probably the only solution to the mess in Iraq.>
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.