‘Pie in the sky’ report won’t fix Iraq
By Peter Galbraith | Thursday, December 7, 2006 | The Boston Globe
Peter Galbraith served as the first US ambassador to Croatia during the Clinton administration. He is a prolific author and occasional contributor to the OP-Ed pages of both the New York Times and The Boston Globe. His new book is “The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End.”
Galbraith thinks the Iraq Study Group’s report is dead on arrival. He takes on the most important issues and recommendations one by one, but ultimately his conclusion is that the report fails to acknowledge the fact that Iraq has ruptured already along ethnic lines. Prior to the current civil war. it took extraordinary, deadly force and a harsh despot to hold Iraq’a factions together into a very arbitrary ‘nation’. He thinks Iraq is well on its way to disintegration, and he predicts the emergence of smaller nations based on cultural and religious identity – just like former Yugoslavia, where he was the US ambassador. Also like Yugoslavia, where James Baker expended all his diplomatic force on the impossible task of holding a similar divided nation together, he thinks Baker does not accept or understand the historic forces dividing Iraq. But it is not all bleakness here: Galbraith offers several channels for constructive intervention based on a totally different paradigm of what Iraq is, and always has been, and seemingly inevitably, what it will become…BS
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One Response to “‘Pie in the sky’ report won’t fix Iraq”
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Back in the 21st Century (for those of us who still believe the study of history is important), there used to be a saying, “Only Saddam Hussein could unify Iraq.”
Posted on 14-Dec-06 at 5:29 pm | Permalink