The Senate has just voted, 75-23, in favor of a non-binding resolution supporting the partitioning of Iraq into a loose confederation of majority Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish states, respectively.
The resolution was supported by Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KA), both running distantly behind for their parties' respective presidential nominations. Are we finally reaching the bipartisan consensus on the war in Iraq that we've been saying is "right around the corner" for months?
I'm thrilled that it took the nice people in Washington - on both sides of the aisle - four and a half years to realize that our approach from day one was just not a good idea at all. Of course, maybe the Democrats will stand up and call for an immediate, outright withdrawal because that's what the shortsighted mob mentality of the American public is right now, or maybe the Republicans will stand up and call for the continuation of business-as-usual privatized war because, hey, election season is coming up and it's about time for the Blackwater and Haliburton dollars to start rolling in. They're gonna be needed too, if the Republicans want to hold onto a respectable number of the 22 Senate seats they have up in 2008 versus 12 for the Democrats.
Yessir, if we can just keep the Democrats and the Republicans feuding between unresolvable extremes on Iraq policy, we may be able to keep that right up without getting anything practical accomplished at least until the 2008 elections.
Maybe, if we're really lucky, we can keep staying away from real issues like we've been doing. We could avoid talking about things like restructuring social security, tacking the health care problem that's bad and getting worse by the day, and keep the pressure off China to float the yuan while the dollar collapses under us. If we can avoid all that and go forward with a government bailout of the shortsighted profit-mongers in the mortgage industry (to prove we didn't learn anything from the Savings & Loan crisis in the 1980s), and continue to ignore our municipality-level water mismanagement and -
Oh, right, yes - hi. As I was saying, if we keep up this unresolvable ideological posturing on issues like Iraq, the two major parties should be able to keep swimming in more and more lobbying dollars just about long enough to run our economy, and probably our civil liberties, right into the ground.
But it looks like maybe we won't be able to keep it up for too much longer, what with the pragmatic bipartisan compromises and all. But seriously, who ever would have thought about a group of "states" banding together, under some kind of loose "articles of confederation?"
How un-American.
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The real question about the Iraq partition is Turkey. Ankara knows that a Kurdish state in what used to be northern Iraq would absolutely set off a wave of separatist sentiment from Turkisk Kurds (excuse me, "Mountain Turks"). Turkish Kurds have been trying to separate for almost a century and with a Kurdish state right next door, they would probably attempt to secede. Much of the reason for Turkey's venture into northern Iraq has to do with growing support for a partition strategy. Turkey won't allow it.
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