Creating the New Palestinians

Surrendering seems like such a straightforward thing but in practice it can be incredibly nuanced and subtle.

Case in point. Whenever Michael O'Hanlon recommends something, I'm automatically disposed to supporting the opposite. He seems perfectly reasonable but over the years I've come to react with a certain confusion over just what the heck he is thinking when he recommends foreign policies.

He writes (again) to support ethnically cleansing Iraq's regions of minorities so that Kurds have their land, Shias have their land, and Sunnis have their own--and then they can just glare at each other and entrench the existing hostilities within a federal Iraq.

I don't think it is a good idea.

Even aside from the immorality and bizareness of supporting ethnic cleansing when we went to war in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s to stop ethnic cleansing, the proposal is wrong. I do not think we can trust Sunnis with their own little homeland on the West Bank of the Tigris. Nor do I think the Shias could be safe under this scheme with every rich Sunni funneling money and arms to the new Sunni homeland while encouraging the Iraqi Sunnis to continue the fight to "liberate" the Shia and Kurdish areas.

The Sunnis in this rump Iraq exiled from Iraq's mixed regions, would of course insist on a right of return to their former stomping grounds in the Shia and Kurdish provinces. Eventually, the Shia and Kurdish regions would react by simply cutting of the Sunni Arab regions from all oil revenue and then the once-mighty and prosperous Sunni Arabs of Iraq will be impoverished wretches egged on by the Sunni Arab world that sits comfortably at home while the Iraqi Sunnistan residents fight another enemy of the Sunni Arab world.

Hmm. Sounding familiar? Even if we do finally manage to "solve" that Palestinian issue we'd simply create the New Palestinians in western Iraq with refugees in Syria and Jordan who lost their homes to provide the obligatory sad stories for the media to broadcast in Europe and the Moslem world.

And it is worse, too. In the new Sunnistan, al Qaeda would set up shop with their sights set on us as well as Iraq's Shia state.

What a grand idea, eh? Almost gives "nuance" a bad name.