Thanks to Bruno and el Contrarioloco for getting the juices going on what’s been a day of personal frustration (watch this space for a description of the planes, trains, and automobiles (and boats!) trip I’m set to take this weekend for no good reason).
Anyway, here’s the problem with the Kurdistan idea they’ve been discussing — Turkey. Fact is that Turkey is becoming a more and more unstable place these days. They’re pissed [note: no asterix! thanks, Georgie boy] over the way they’ve been shafted over Cyprus, there’re enough Islamists in the country to make the military and economic elites nervous, and they continue to be suspicious of anything that might support the Turkish Kurds.
The only way a US troop withdrawal to Iraqi Kurdistan works is if Bush can somehow swing Turkish entry into the EU in return for their cooperation. The Euros have had their collective panties in a bundle over this for decades, not least because they fear the impact hordes of job-seeking brown people will have on their lilly-white, barely functional economies. Do I need mention the Euros can also be a tad racist? Anyway, point is that that’s one big-ass mo-fo carrot Bush-san needs to dangle to get the Turks to play ball, and the Republic of Texas itself ain’t got a … carrot … that big.
So I’ll stick by my own plan, mooted on this week’s show, that the way to do this is to let Iraq split up into three parts, with the oil industry owned by an international trust and revenues divvied up to the three regions according to population size. US troops stick around Iraq — importantly, with an international mandate — long enough to 1) oversee the inevitable population resettlements; 2) establish quasi-democracy in each of the three regions; and 3) provide protection for the oil assets. To do that, they’ll need permanent bases in the country, but will at least have limited scope. International peacekeepers can be brought in to protect the borders between the 3 new statelets, and everyone is less unhappy than they’d otherwise be.
