Globalist: A Two-State Solution for Iraq? (Part I)

clipped from www.theglobalist.com With escalating sectarian violence, the need for a political solution to stabilize Iraq has become imperative. About the only political alternative — other than moving toward direct talks with Iran and Syria — has been a three-way ethnic partition of Iraq. The problems of that approach, however, are glaring. Either Kurds or Sunnis would go without the support of oil revenues, depending on which group won the struggle for the major oil fields near Kirkuk in the north of Iraq. Turkey would probably feel compelled to invade a purely Kurdish state at some point — if only because its domestic Kurdish rebels would at some point probably provoke a military reaction and try to use Kurdish Iraq as a refuge. And a Shiite state could well be unstable, with the traditional, largely agrarian majority in the south pitted against the angry and desperately poor urban core of Moqtada Sadr's followers from the slums of east Baghdad.