In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is president ... Tony Kinsellaargues that partitioning Iraq won't be easy, but apportioning blame is straightforward
Charles Krauthammer began his column this week on a partitioned Iraq with a quote from Julius Caesar - Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres (Gaul is divided into three parts) - an assertion that many of Caesar's contemporaries, and all Asterix readers, recognise as debatable.
Erasmus's dictum - In regione caecorum rex est lucus (in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king) - might have been more appropriate.
As a defender of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Krauthammer performs the classic conservative intellectual somersault of blaming the victims - "the US tried to give the Iraqis a republic, but their leaders turned out to be, tragically, too driven by sectarian sentiment, by an absence of national identity and by the habits of suspicion and manoeuvre cultivated during decades in the underground of Saddam's totalitarian state".
The US did its best, made a few mistakes, but the incompetent Iraqis are responsible for the mess.
Krauthammer argues for reluctant recognition of the de-facto ethnic partition of Iraq into Kurdish, Sunni and Shia regions, admits that Baghdad remains an unanswered mess, and postulates that such a partition will lead to stability if not harmony. The US, he tells us, "does not have a Mr Sykes or a Mr Picot sitting down to a map of Mesopotamia in a first World War carving exercise".
Sykes and Picot did sit down after the first World War to carve up the Middle Eastern territories of the collapsed Ottoman Empire. Sykes was the more able for London took the lion's share, leaving Picot's France with the oil-free Syria and Lebanon.
Britain had two main priorities, securing the passage to India by bolstering its Egyptian protectorate, and securing Arab and Iranian oil resources to supply its navy.
London's invention of Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, coupled with its organisation of the Gulf sheikdoms, gave us our modern map of the troubled region.
Iraq was created out of three old Ottoman provinces, the Kurdish north around Mosul, the Sunni centre around Baghdad, and the Shia south. The Shia south was radically altered by London separating out Kuwait in payment for services rendered by its ruling Al-Sabah family. Kuwait would remain a British protectorate until its independence in 1961.
Iraq depended on an authoritarian, Sunni-led government, itself dependent on foreign backers. Saddam Hussein's US-facilitated rise to power in the 1960s was a continuation of this tradition of authoritarian Sunni rule. Washington's unilateral decision to attack Iraq in 2003, coupled with vapid desires to organise a "flowering of democracy" on the banks of the Tigris was a pure colonial "carving exercise".
It appears that the US pro-consul Paul Bremer decided on de-Baathification (essentially firing most of Iraq's public servants who had been members of the ruling Baath Party) and disbanding the Sunni-led Iraqi army largely by himself.
This radical policy proposal was buried in a letter to President Bush, never debated in Washington, and had entirely foreseeable disastrous consequences.
The US government decided that Iraq should have a new form of government. It is not clear whether the wanton destruction of civil society in Iraq was a policy decision, or merely a series of mistakes. The result was, however, institutionalised sectarian structures.
The Shia form a majority of Iraq's population, and Shia parties hold a majority in the country's new governing structures. Most Shia leaders did not hone their political skills "during decades in the underground of Saddam's totalitarian state" but in exile, primarily in Iran.
Iraqi Kurdistan is largely autonomous, reasonably democratic and relatively safe by the standards of today's Iraq. Many Kurds would welcome full independence, but there are two dangerous snags.
The internal one is the definition of borders within Iraq. Kurdistan needs to include the Kirkuk and Mosul oil fields to be economically viable, but these cities contain significant Arab Sunni populations, as well as Turkmen and Christian minorities. Should Kurdistan seek to take those oil fields and ethnically cleanse their cities, its neighbours would retaliate.
There is a large Kurdish minority in eastern Turkey, and significant Kurdish populations in Iran and Syria. There have been clashes along the Turkish-Kurdistan and Iranian-Kurdistan borders. A non-negotiated Kurdish bid for independence is a recipe for war.
Any Shia-Sunni arrangement sticks on Baghdad with its mixed communities, and the lack of oil resources in Sunni regions. A Shia drive to impose a solution would lead to full-scale war. Sunni neighbours such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia would find it all but impossible to avoid being sucked in.
Partition is not an easy option, whether desirable or not. The responsibility for the bloody chaos that is Iraq lies not in the shortcomings of its leadership, but in the foolhardy, not to say ignorant, shortcomings of the US administration.
It decided to tear up the WW1 settlement. It never designed a replacement, and now lacks the power to impose one. The only exit involves negotiating with Iraq and her neighbours, slowly moving towards some kind of equitable settlement.
Perhaps the best opening quote would have been Colin Powell's 2002 china shop warning - "you break it, you own it."