Slicing Up Iraq in Order to Save It

The Independent Institute's Ivan Eland sees Vietnam in Iraq, and calls for some radical amputation to save the patient:

When armed guerrillas roam the countryside, even a free and fair democratic vote may be irrelevant to the outcome. According to a New York Times article from 1967, the Johnson administration was pleased as punch then about an 83 percent voter turnout in South Vietnamese elections. We all know how that conflict turned out: the majority went to the polls and the armed minority eventually went to the halls of power.

If the president and the Republican Congress really wanted to do the Iraqi people a favor…they would abandon the illusion that merely allowing the Iraqis to vote will eventually make them free and prosperous.

Iraq was carved out of three provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire by the British in the 1920s and has been an artificial country ever since….If given a real choice–instead of the constrained option offered by a heavily armed occupying power to elect the leaders of a unified U.S.-like federation–Iraqis might want a looser confederation, with increased autonomy for various ethnic/religious groups, or even a partition of the country into separate states.

Genuine self-determination that would probably lead to such decentralized governance–accompanied by a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces–would likely take the fire out of the insurgency. The foreign occupier would be gone and no strong central government would exist to threaten to oppress groups that didn't control it. Security could be provided locally, rather than nationally, using existing Kurdish and Shiite militias and insurgents converted to security forces in Sunni areas.