Redstate

The Unified Moonbat Theory Revealed

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

I’m a confirmed critic of the idea of partitioning Iraq. I am not alone. I find company in pundits as varied as Anthony Cordesman and Christopher Hitchens. But the best analysis of the reasons why partitioning Iraq is wrongheaded comes in a review of Peter Galbraith’s End of Iraq.

The reviewer, it turns out, actually identifies a Unified Moonbat Theory that takes in all the Iraq plans offered by the Democrats and demolishes them.

Read on.

Galbraith and his book have become very influential. For those who wonder where Joe Biden got his ideas look no further. It’s all there. And Galbraith was even Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Croatia when the Dayton Accords, again so favorably reviewed by Biden, were hammered out.

In his review, Reidar Visser, a Middle Eastern scholar at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, explains that partitioning Iraq is based on a lot of fallacious assumptions.

Galbraith is at pains to render Iraq as an “artificial” and highly fissile construct. Indeed, he accuses his political opponents of “a misreading of Iraq’s modern history” (p. 206). But as soon as he moves beyond his particular area of expertise – the Kurdish north – the narrative becomes less convincing and the arguments more strained. For instance, Galbraith on two occasions reiterates the now widespread but highly erroneous notion that current ethno-religious divisions in Iraq strongly correlate to the old administrative organization of the Ottoman Empire: Mosul was supposedly “Kurdish”, Baghdad “Sunni”, and Basra “Shiite”…

In reality, however, Mosul was essentially a mixed-race province, whereas Baghdad, though home to a large Sunni community, was probably the largest Shiite province of the Ottoman Empire – with its borders extending as far south as today’s Muthanna governorate and with all the rural territory surrounding the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala solidly Shiite, Baghdad was actually far more of a Shiite point of gravity than was Basra (which politically was Sunni-dominated). This in turn means that there was never any such close fit between ethno-religious and administrative maps as that suggested by Galbraith, and that Iraq has in fact a far longer record of ethno-religious coexistence than he seems prepared to admit…

Galbraith’s “Iraq was just cobbled together” thesis is similarly trite and equally misleading: it is true that for some thirty years between the 1880s and 1914 there was administrative separation between Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, but before that there had been frequent intervals of administrative unity between some or all of these areas (especially Basra and Baghdad) – as was the case under the Ottomans and Georgian mamluk rule in the early nineteenth and eighteenth century as well as during long periods of the classical Islamic age (and even under a succession of Mongol rulers after 1258, if more flimsily so)…

The idea of coexistence in Iraq is “absurd” charges Galbraith on pp. 100–101. The decisive proof? Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union all fell apart. But what about other possible comparisons, such as Lebanon – which descended into ethno-religious mayhem and saw extensive internal displacement of its population from 1975 to 1990, only to rise again as a unitary “mosaic”-like state? Today’s sectarian violence in Baghdad is certainly reminiscent of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, where talk of partition and confederations materialized in some circles at particularly gloomy junctures, only to dissipate later on….

At last, Galbraith recognizes – at least implicitly –that the Shiites are not such a united bloc, and that several statelets might well materialize through a process of federalization, with the United States quite powerless to affect the turn of events. (He seems to voice some preference for a single Shiite state; presumably this would form a stronger counterweight to Iran than several statelets, p. 219.) The consequence, of course, is that, in terms of formulating a comprehensive policy alternative, Galbraith’s “plan” is not really all that sophisticated. It differs little from the more standard demand for immediate US withdrawal, except for the barely disguised call for putting more arms into Kurdish hands (p. 215) and the prospect of erecting a permanent US military base in Kurdish territory – this would apparently do service as a deterrent against what Galbraith candidly describes as the danger of carbon copies of Taliban-era Afghanistan and revolutionary Iran evolving in Sunni and Shiite areas as side effects of his plan. In other words, this is basically a “let’s get out and hope for the best” initiative.

There it is. Let’s get out and hope for the best. That is what all the Democrat plans have in common from John Murtha’s pathetically addled concept of establishing an “over the horizon” presence in Okinawa to Joe Biden’s mindboggling unity-through-division scheme.

Murtha’s plan is merely a pell-mell dash for Kuwait and thence to parts West. After getting out he will hope things go well. Biden will repudiate the constitution, divide the country into ethnic cantons, run for Kuwait and points West and then hope for the best.

None are focused on success. All are focused on bugging out and hoping against hope something less than a disaster will result.

One does not have to believe things are going well in Iraq to see that their plans are nothing short of a sure formula of a geopolitical and human tragedy that will equal that of the Vietnam scenario they have tried so hard to recreate.