THE REAL PROBLEM WITH IRAQ

This article was originally published in Right Now in 2005. With Iraq now in a state of disintegration, many of the points made in the article shine with new relevance.

by Colin Liddell

Call me naïve, but when Iraq fell to the American-led and British-followed invasion of 2003, I thought the simplest solution to the problem posed by this country to the region and itself would also be the one most acceptable to its three main ethnic groups, the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, namely a messy but cathartic divorce that would allow each of the three groups to achieve separate nationhood and with it internal integrity and security.

Ethnic maps of Iraq revealed that the South and East of the country was and is overwhelmingly Shiite in population, while Sunnis were prevalent in the Centre and West, with the Kurds already semi-independent in the North. Given the centuries of bad blood between these three groups, exacerbated over the last few decades by Saddam's Baathist regime, it seemed a Sisyphean labor to try and force these three distinct groups to live harmoniously together.

The common sense and, indeed, moral approach would have been to appoint a boundary commission to draw up appropriate borders, and then use the inevitably limited period of American and allied military occupation to peacefully separate Iraq's three groups into three new nations and facilitate the