The Sunni Arabs of Iraq have much to answer for.  Since they have always made up a rather small minority—about 15 to 20 percent of the country's total population—the regimes they created were historically authoritarian ones.  They compensated for their small base by employing especially brutal methods against their Kurdish and Shia neighbors.  Successive Sunni governments became steadily more repressive, leading eventually to the rule of the Baath Party and culminating in the ferocious regime of Saddam Hussein. 

Baathist Iraq was often compared to Nazi Germany: Saddam was said to play the role of Adolf Hitler and the Baath Party that of the Nazi Party.  A more accurate comparison, however, would analogize the Baath Party to the Waffen S.S., the Nazi Party's elite unit, and the Sunni Arab community to the Nazi Party as a whole, which eventually made up as much as 15 percent of Germany's population.


I beg to differ.  I find Kurth's cheap equating of an ethnic minority with a fascist political party troubling on many levels.  I believe a "more accurate comparison" would be to "analogize" the pre-war Sunni Arab community to the Tutsi ethnic minority of Rwanda, with the Shiites playing the part of the long-suffering Hutu majority.  I also feel it is an "accurate comparison" to place Kurth's "solution" to the Iraq problem alongside the solution the Hutus came up with for the Tutsis.  I don't see much difference, do you?

Kurth continues to mix his metaphors like a drunken bartender:


Many commentators have suggested partitioning Iraq into three states—Shia, Kurdish, and Sunni.  This would be a good solution in many respects (analogous to the partitioning of the former Yugoslavia).


Right, the famous Balkan success story.


Critics of this proposal would no doubt point to the likely reactions of Iraq's neighbors.


This critic would point instead to Kurth's blatant indifference to human life—particularly the lives of the Sunni people.  His central thesis is that for Iraq to survive, an entire ethnic minority needs to be wiped out, to provide spiritual cleansing for the future Iraq.  This is not some nut mouthing off on his blog.  Kurth is a nut/senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a regular contributor to the venerable New Republic magazine.  This is what their longtime idealistic, neoconservative ideology has come to?  Ethnic cleansing? 

He keeps going:


Wouldn't a Shia state in Iraq simply become an ally or even a puppet of Shia Iran?  This would undoubtedly be the case for a few years.  But Arabs are unlikely to accept long-term domination by Persians, whatever their religious commonality.  An Arab Shia state in Iraq would ultimately become an independent actor (perhaps like communist Yugoslavia quickly became independent of the Soviet Union).


Once again, Kurth either ignores, or is actually ignorant of, the history of the Balkan genocides of the 1990's.  His historical rationalizations need only be supported by five minutes of peace for them to be good enough for him. 

Did Yugoslavia become independent of the Soviet union at some point?  Yes.  Is the history of Yugoslavia one emerging nations like Iraq would like to emulate?  Hell No.  Was Yugoslavia eventually partitioned into successfully autonomous regions?  Yes, for the most part.  Would Iraq like to go through what the people of those regions had to go through, to achieve that separation? 

Well, they're going through it now.  The question is, will they ever get out of it, and how?

Kurth's way: take the three groups, Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd, and just butcher the one in the middle.  The New Republic should be ashamed that it published this trash.