Interesting there Jarhead, OK, we got your best case scenario, care to give us what you think will play out in reality. I hope you take the term jarhead as a term of endearment because it is meant that way.
Haven't you heard? Cheney's office has alreadu come up with a recipe for a new, finger-lickin' good Middle East.
Their idea is pretty simple: you just admit that Iraq has blown up into a mess, claim you always meant to do it that way, and then smile at the camera and say, "Just look what a great set of ingredients we've now got scattered all over the kitchen! Gosh-golly, let's make something great out of all this! Grab those intestines off the ceiling, gimme that hunk of thigh off the wall-clock, and toss that gob of smoking skull off the sink! Let's get cookin'!"
Step one is chopping up Iraq into three pieces, the P-word, "partition." It's got a kind of sense to it: if the Sunni, Shia and Kurds can't stop killing each other, let's just give each group its own little tribal homeland.
The reason Bush's people haven't latched onto this idea sooner is that they're supposed to be creating a free, democratic Iraq and it doesn't look good to break the place down into tribal homelands when you've gone around promising to make Iraq the Jeffersonian Democracy of the Middle East. But things are so bad now that nobody in the administration can afford to worry about PR problems like that any more. Torture killings are now officially the national sport of Iraq. When somebody gets out a power drill in Baghdad, nobody thinks Home Improvement. Instead, I hear Black & Decker is getting its own volume in the next edition of Jane's Weapons Systems.
But, there's just one little problem with splitting Iraq into three nice little homelands: Iran.
If you smash Saddam Hussein's united Iraq, you've destroyed the one army in the region that could have held the Iranians in check. If you go in after that and replace a united Iraq with three little ethnic states, you've just made a big sandbox for the Persians to play in. They can easily destabilize all three of the Iraqi statelets; in fact, the biggest, the Shia Iraqi statelet, won't even need to be stabilized. It'll side with Iran every time against the Sunnis. It won't have a choice.
Anyways, Cheney's plan doesnt stop with just Iraq though. The idea is to divide up every state in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia gets split into a Shia state on the Persian Gulf (where all the oil is), a "Sacred State" with Mecca and Medina, and someplace that ought to be called The Republic of Leftover Sand, with Riyadh and not much else. Lebanon turns into teeny, ethnically pure neighborhood states for Christians, Sunni, Shia and maybe Mormons. Yep, turns out all that Lebanese unity was a danger to the region, we've gotta go in there and break the place up a little more.
Are you beginning to understand why popping out a few nukes is a much more reasonable proposition?
Cheney is bat**** insane.
