With an occupying force caught in the middle and hated by most if not all. And the fight over natural resources, which burns really well.

Shiites could play Serbia, Iran could play the enabling (manipulating) Russia. Although this time, the US will not be able to play the role of savior to an oppressed people.

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As I've previously commented here the breakup is all about disenfranchizing the Sunnis whose tradition of nationalism and developmentalist autarchy would never allow a new strategy of neo-liberal corporate globalization. Old Iraq was based on the middle class civil service, small business, professional and technical cadre, and state sector managerial elite. Unskilled workers and the small rich class were marginalized. This was Saddam's social basis and source of political legitimation. Workers were disallowed from strikes and the regime was a kind of petty bourgeous nationalist one.

The US strategy is to break this model down and globalize the Iraqi economy. Autonomy in the north and south where the oil is concentrated fits the strategy of the oil grab. Marginalizing the Sunnis and the 100 Bremer Orders gets the Iraqi economy in line with all the WTO guidelines on trade, investments, patent protection and intellectual property rights for transnational capital, and financial liberalization. When the smoke clears, Iraq should be more or less foreign owned. Of Course most of the locally accrued wealth will go to political patrons of foreign capital. Iraq has politically transformed from a modern developmentalist middle class based regime to a federated, patrimonial, traditional regime with extremes of wealth and poverty and utterly externally dependant both militarily and economically!!

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The discussion within the U.S. foreign policy establishment on the future of Iraq has come to a conclusion. The U.S. will, now officially, work to dissolve the Iraqi nation and state into three independend statelets under a powerless sham national government and, of course, total U.S. control.

The current version of the idea was first floated back in May by Senator Biden and Leslie Gelb, both Democrats, in a NYT oped.

The Baker Iraq Study Group, set up to look at new policy options in Iraq, leaked its coming results, i.e. the implementation of the Biden/Gelb plan, to Murdoch's London Times:

His group will not advise "partition", but is believed to favour a division of the country that will devolve power and security to the regions, leaving a skeletal national government in Baghdad in charge of foreign affairs, border protection and the distribution of oil revenue.

A few days ago, Middle East expert Col. Pat Lang has called this inevitable:

Iraq is going to be partitioned. This may be either de facto or de jure but it will be partitioned. The process of disintegration launched by the United States in eliminating the mechanisms of state integrity has progressed so far that effective dissolution of the old Iraq is inevitable. The recent frustrated desperation evident in the statements of the US command in Baghdad, and the ridiculous futility of Dr. Rice's latest trip are unmistakable signs of disintegration. Indeed, the partition is now underway.

As Col. Lang emphasizes, the seeds for partioning were laid when Cheney and the neocon figures around him ordered the Iraqi army to be disbanded and the de-Baathification of the Iraqi government, i.e. its total annulment. The idea of partitioning Iraq may even have been the very reason for the war.

The New Middle East expression goes back to the "Clean Break" document (pdf) prepared 1996 by U.S. neocons as a strategy for Israel's Netanyahu government. The first modern partition Iraq argument was made by Zionist strategist Oded Yinon in 1982. In A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties he recommends:

In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.

The now imminent, new policy of partitioning Iraq is indeed only the announcement of the result of a process that has been the plan and the policy all along.

This is a real "Mission Accomplished" moment.

If the policy is effective, which will be decided on streets of Iraq, this is a huge success for a clique of neocon U.S. supporters of Israels colonial strategy to divide and conquer.

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if you really understood understood history, human societies and government, you would know that having a rich large county like iraq which is divided between two religious sects is a GOOD THING for the neoliberal elite. THe more heterogeneous and large a country is, the more the people are divided against themselves and the more the elite can exploit them. Iraq is a heaven for the neoliberal elite, with the sunnis and shia at each others' throat.

The best nations are those that are small and relatively heterogeneous, e.g., Denmark, switzerland, sweden, etc. There, the elite have a hard time breaking up the will up the people. Of course the elite have made some headways by instituting the EU, and by contaminating those countries with third world immigrants. But the euros are a lot smarter than Americans--already they have partially thwarted the EU elites, and they have managed to force their governments to throttle back on the mass immigation.

As for Iraq, and TRUE leftist would say, BREAK IT UP!

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It may well be the U.S. strategy but it's being driven by Iran. It wasn't the UIA that pushed it, it ws SCIRI.

I've said it a thousand times, and I'll say it again: the American left is just as prone as the right to think it's all about us and that we're in control of everything that happens but that's a bit of American exceptionalism and simply not true.

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There were a few accusations in 2005 of Iranians arming Shia militias, that were made in the U.K. press as well as the Washington Times. These proved un-substantiated. These assertions need to be taken with a big grain of salt.
More recently the opposite was indicated by this U.S. General:

No evidence Iran active in Iraq: US general

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - There is no evidence the Iranian government is stirring trouble in Iraq, a U.S. general said on Monday, playing down suggestions that Tehran will retaliate for U.S. backing of Israel's war on Hizbollah.

"There is nothing that we definitively have found to say that there are any Iranians operating within the country of Iraq," Major General William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, told a news conference.

U.S. officials have previously said the war between Israel and Iran-backed Hizbollah might encourage Tehran to make mischief in Iraq to pressure the United States, which has some 130,000 troops in the country.

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However I wouldn't doubt that Iran would like influence in Iraq. Joshua, do you doubt that Israel seeks influence in Iraq? And why do you focus only on the former?

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