Iraq needed Saddam?

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If the goal is a "united Iraq", which is a bit bizarre since the nation of "Iraq" writ large is a colonial invention, then I would say there's probably no way it can occur - at least from without. And I highly doubt the various factions/groups currently engaged in a bloody civil war are going to do it on their own hook.

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As was the United States, which only truly became a unified nation after its own bloody civil war.-

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On the other hand, if the goal is regional stability (relatively speaking), then partition appears the only pragmatic answer.

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Partition is always a good idea, as Ireland, India, and Israel have shown.-

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That was no joke about them going to war to prevent the creation of a Kurdish nation.

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Not to mention Iran also contains a part of the Kurdish "homeland" and so has its own interests regarding an independent Kurdish state. So much for the idea of partition creating stability.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

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Modern democracies might well have evolved in the Middle East if the region had not been sliced, diced and Frankensteined by the West.

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Perhaps. However, most regions of the world contain highly inhomogenous populations. If homogeneity is a requirement for stability, then most nations would end up too small and noncompact to be viable. Don't forget that homogeneity in Western Europe was as much of a product of the nationalization process of the 18th and 19th centuries as was the democratization movements.The examples of homogenous autocracies and of non-homogenous democracies suggests to me, personally, that this correlation between democracy and homogeneity is more an artifact of the idiosyncracies of European history than an inevitable part of human nature.I do agree that a lot of the problems of the third world do stem as a legacy of colonialism, and the old "divide and conquer" tactics of exacerbating (or even creating) tribal rivalries is a part of the problem. But another major problem is that democracy in the developing world (and the result that the resources of each developing nation would be used to benefit the people of that nation, not the Western economies) runs counter to the interests of the West. As a result, either stability is deliberately thwarted by Western policies, or it is the inadvertant result of political and economic policies forced onto the developing nations.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

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What examples?

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Um, India?

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

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leaving a Hindu majority of 80%.

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Which is pretty irrelevant. When those people talk about homogeneity being a prerequisite for democracy they are usually talking about ethnicity, not just religion. Maybe you are an exception, but this underscores one of the main points against the democracy = homogeneity argument: the criteria for "sufficiently homogenous" are pretty flexible, variable, and clearly any example I can come up with of a non-homogenous democracy will end up being "homogenous" after all.-

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Even now, that subcontinent's Muslim-Hindu friction makes it an A-lister for the first thermonuclear exchange.

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The friction being between two nations that were formed in order to ensure "homogeneity". Not that this has anything to do with whether India or Pakistan, both pretty inhomogenous nations, are democracies.-

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At any rate, I don't want to sidetrack the topic.

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Well, the topic is what does Iraq "need", and one "need" that is on the table is that some non-Iraqis think that Iraq "needs" to be divided into several smaller "homogenous" units. Maybe that would be a good idea, maybe a bad idea; but I think that whether it is good or bad should be determined by more practical matters than some folk wisdom that homogeneity is a prerequisite for democracy.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

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Do you have another idea? If so, I'd like to hear it.

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I guess my point is that maybe we aren't the ones that should be coming up with the ideas. This should be something determined by the Iraqis themselves. I could be wrong, but I am under the impression that both Sunnis and Shiites oppose even a federated nation; the Kurds being the only ones that might support that idea. I could be wrong about this; if the Iraqis themselves are in favor of federation or partition, then by all means it is a viable idea that should be considered.I just doubt that imposing a solution that is opposed by the majority of people that would be affected by it is a recipe for peace or stability.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Well, if you merely suggesting possible solutions that should be considered, then I have no objections. Certainly, to me some kind of federated republic sounds like a good idea -- but I am inherently biased against centralized authority (even if "democratic"). I'm also partial to the idea of self-determination -- if the Kurds don't want to be part of any kind of Iraq, I find it hard to come up with an argument to force them to remain part of Iraq.My main concern is that whatever solution comes about will be one that will mainly be in the interests of the West. I hate to sound like a neo-Marxist, anti-imperialist conspiracy theory nutcase (but I am, so what can I do?), but I fear that too much decentralization or partition will result in mini-states so weak that they can't really be considered autonomous.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

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Precisely, because the preponderance of commonality is crucial to a viable state, democratic or otherwise, whether that commonality is a product of ethnic homogeneity, economic necessity, or an organic process of accommodation such as what once existed in Lebanon (and the Indian subcontinent) prior to colonization.

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Sure. But all populations are inhomegenous to some degree. Show some sort of instability, and if someone tries they will be able to find some sort of difference and be able to say that this is the cause of the instability. Saying that differences are the cause of instability and strife is like saying that oxygen is the cause of fires. It may very well be true, but becomes such a trivial observation that it doesn't really explain why some places are stable and others are not.I mean, really! India is composed of hundreds of different ethnic groups speaking many different languages. Yet India is a relatively stable democracy. So somehow it must be homogenous. I know! They're all Hindu! Hey! Homogeneity! Our theory is saved! Bleh. If someone would come up with a metric for homogeneity, another metric for stability, and show a correlation through a linear regression analysis then maybe we'd have something sensible to talk about.-

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Doing nothing--once already engaged--is also choosing.

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And may even be the right choice in some cases.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

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And had the population been one third Muslim, one third Hindu, and one third evangelical Christian, in addition to that diverse ethnic mix, it would have cohered politically just as well as with the 80% Hindu population? I doubt it.

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What if India had been 100% Hindu but was riven with ethnic violence and in the throes of civil war? My bet is that people would be pointing to India and saying that such a diverse ethnic mix makes a viable democratic state impossible.That is my problem with this sort of "analysis". The ethnic mix is not important in terms of homogeneity when India has a measure of stability. Ethnic mix would be important if India were like Afghanistan.I have no doubt that in any stable democracy one can find some sort of "commonality", and I have no doubt that in countries undergoing civil strife one can find "differences". However, one can also find "differences" in stable democracies and "commonalities" in counties in the midst of civil war. You dismiss my "differences" in the case of India and play up the "commonality". But why does "commonality" win out over "differences" in some cases, and "differences" win out over "commonality" in others?In the case of Iraq, is there a reason to think that the main groups of people cannot live together in a single country? Sure, namely the fact that they are currently fighting one another is as good a reason as any. But is there any reason to think that Shiite and Sunnis are fundamentally, inherently incapable of living together? I don't know. Are these particular Sunnis and these particular Shiites incapable of living together? I don't know. But if they are not capable of living together, then I suspect the reason has more to do with recent history and maybe the particular cultures in this case than simply because Shiites and Sunnis are "too different" to live together in the same country.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine