this is, to a certain extent, a leap of faith, me writing this, because i don't actually believe that anyone reads this blog, since i don't pimp it to anyone, even my friends. but i do believe that the logosphere (for lack of a better term) has something of a life of its own, and that an idea, once floated, can have an effect, simply by being out there.

i suppose what i'm saying is, in effect, that the tree does make a sound, even if noone is there to hear it.

so here's my brilliant idea for what to do about iraq. it's got a couple of moving parts, but it goes something like this:

first step, partition kurdistan and let the kurds have their own country, defended, if need be, by the same no-fly zones that we and the brits maintained to protect them from saddam. you never hear about it, but the kurds are the one good thing, aside from the actual ouster of saddam, that have come from w's war. they've got the beginnings of a representational democracy, enough oil to jump-start an economy, and the peshmerga for keeping their borders secure. sure, turkey'll squawk over it, since they love to oppress their own kurdish minority and don't want them getting any ideas, but maybe we can get the europeans to make it a part of the deal for entering the european union, which the turks would dearly love to do.

that leaves the sunnis and the shiites, who're already fighting a civil war, even if the western media refuses to call it that (kind of like they refuse to call darfur a genocide). whether we stay or not, it's going to get really ugly, and the sunnis are going to lose, because the shiites not only outnumber them by a factor of five or six, and have a few decades' worth of pent-up resentment from sunni oppression under saddam and his ba'ath party goons. we can't really partition them apart, because the shiites would get all the oil and the sunnis won't stand for that kind of marginalization.

so here's what we do: we relocate the sunnis, to america if necessary. it seems only fair, since we screwed up the chance for them to stay and participate in iraq's new beginning. sure, it would be expensive, but almost undoubtedly less so than maintaining our occupation in iraq, and it would buy us some much needed goodwill in the world, especially the middle east.

there are undoubtedly a million problems with this solution (just like every other solution currently on the table), but if we can obviate the sectarian tensions, then the iraqis have a much better chance of making it, and we can bring the vast majority of the troops home.

just a thought.