Will Iraq survive as a nation?

Bush speaks as though the measure of success of the American invasion of Iraq will be the acceptance of a Constitution, the resulting new Iraqi government, and the training of a unified Iraqi army and police force to provide stability and maintain the government and the unified and democratic nation of Iraq.

This is a sharply reduced set of goals from the original ones of removing Saddam, finding and defusing the nuclear weapons and eliminating the chemical and biological ones Bush was sure were there. OK. So he did get Saddam out. The resulting mess Jerry Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority made of the situation in Iraq need not be discussed here. Suffice to say the goals now considered as being success in Iraq are a lot different from the original ones Bush used to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Knight Ridder's reporter in Kirkurk, Tom Lesseter, is not nearly as optimistic even of the current Bush goals. Lesseter is reporting how the Kurds in the north have been filling the Northern Iraqi army with members of the Peshmerga (Kurdish militia) in anticipation of the ultimate breakup of Iraq into three parts. At that time, many Kurds expect to take over the Iraqi army in the north and use it to reconquer Kirkurk and perhaps half of Mosul (the second largest city in Iraq.) That military force will then be used to defend the new borders of an independent Kurdistan.

His Kurdish sources also expect the Shiites in the south to take the same action there, establishing a Shiite nation. This will also give those two groups most of the oil in Iraq, leaving the Sunnis in the center of what is now Iraq with essentially none of the oil wealth. The only thing the Sunnis bring to the table after the American troops leave Iraq is an offer to agree to peace and no disruption of Kurdistan and Shiite Iraq.

This rather closely matches the way the recent Iraqi election turned out. Each group overwhelmingly voted for their own tribal leaders. That is rather like Roman elections during the Roman Republic.

My guess is that the Sunni Arabs plan to keep blowing people and things up until they can get the Kurds and Shiite governments to buy them off somehow. They will certainly get support from the Sunni Arabs outside of Iraq.

Bush, of course, hopes to be out of office before the current Iraq breaks up into three new passport-issuing governments with whatever violence that involves.