Stunning.

I'm not certain I agree that Iraq was the right pot to break, being that Iran out of the equation and Saddam still in power doesn't necessarily look too bad on paper, but we'll never know and there's no sense crying about it now. Here's my question.

Barring someone in the State Department stealing the ideas of a constitutional monarchy from Titus, would the separation of Iraq into three independent states destabilize the region to a point of hopeless chaos?

As Titus stated in the last post, there was no Iraq prior to the 1920s. Sahib in Basra and Ahmed in Fahlousha (ouch, I know) can't thump their chests and cry "Iraq!" in the same sense as some yahoo next door in Iran. A Sunni, Shi'ite and Khurdish state does three things.

1) Eliminates sectarian violence in the sense of Sunni vs. Shi'a within neighborhoods.
2) Eliminates the impossible task of creating a government with a Shi'a majority and a Sunni minority in a society built on tribal, or family loyalties.
3) Gives an organized, supervised structure to a procedure that history has shown us time and time again is inevitable. (Ruwanda, Yugoslavia, Armenia, Pakistan, the list goes on)

Now, I'm not glossing over the catastrophic diplomatic failure this would be. For instance,

1) Sectarian violence is replaced by the inevitable ethnic cleansing that 100,000 UN troops would be hard pressed to stop.
2) Turkey would go bonkers. No two ways about it.
3) The fracture of the Iraqi state permanently erases Iraq as a counter to Iran's bid for regional hegemony. (This is the big one.)

I'm not saying we should cut and run. I'm not saying we can't rebuild a state in Iraq. I AM saying that without a facist dictator, holding that nation together is going to be next to impossible.

Once again, it's not my intention to sound defeatist. I have a very deep fear of sectarian violence morphing into flat out ethnic cleansing genocide. Separating the groups into their own states could stop that crisis before it begins. Is it worth it?