Does anyone have thoughts on the situation in Iraq and how it could be improved? Extra marks will be given for some philosophical and political insight into why your suggestions will work best, and under what circumstances there might be problems.
When I have spare time I'll do more research on Iraq. It occurs to me that up til now I've been just following the majority view without having any actual understanding of the situation.
Vitenka's take:
Well, one option is to allow it to devolve into armed CityStates?. This has the advantage of being a somewhat more natural existence for the local environment (which is, after all, vast areas of desert with little oasis of habitable stuff or stuff worth getting) - it has the disadvantage of risking turning into the mess currently present in Africa.
Another option is to give them all guns and wall the area off from the outside world for a decade and see which faction is left alive. This has the disadvantage of being amoral as hell and dooming the kurds.
A third option would be to unite the country in opposition to an obvious enemy - Iran, Turkey and Israel being the obvious options. As well as reducing the population, a victory (Turkey being the easiest target, then) would go a long way to uniting the country - whilst the horrors of war would go a long way to making them prefr peaceful (democratic?) solutions. Of course, it would also royally piss off a (possibly dangerous) enemy - which makes Iran the obvious target, since Iraq seems to just naturally enjoy invading them.
I'm interested that you think that the NATO country is the easiest target out of the three. --Requiem
Well, it'd be Israel for it's small size except that it has nukes. Iran has been at war too often with Iraq, it still has everything in place to defend in that direction. Turkey, whilst it has a nastyish mountain barrier hasn't had a terribly large or well practiced army for quite a while. And we can assume Iran would get allies from places like Syria, whereas since this is 'us' getting Iraq to do the attacks, Turkey wouldn't get squat. --Vitenka (Yeah, if Turkey can call in the might of the USA then things get a bit different)
The Articles of the NATO treaty don't give us a choice. An attack on a member nation of NATO is an attack on all member nations. --SF
Hence the awkwardness in the northwest of Iraq. --Requiem
We're being cynical here - a treaty is just a bit of paper, and worth less since it's been written on already. Oh also - I was specifying an apparent victory, which isn't possible to attain against a perennial enemy without actually wiping them out completely. --Vitenka
In my opinion there are only two groups capable of holding the country together - the mullahs and the tribal leaders. We don't want another Iran - so my solution would be feudalism, or something approximating it. Tribal groups and cities (think 'Boroughs') allowed to form quasi-independent local government owing allegiance to a council of elected representatives of the tribes, either with no single leader or with leadership revolving between tribes on a regular basis (this can be timed to coincide with the US re-election campaigns if desired). Downsides - like Vitenka said, it risks becoming the mess currently present in Africa. Upsides - it is similar enough to traditional systems not to cause massive problems adjusting to the system, and the people in charge would be authoritative and popularly obeyed; it also placates the Kurds and similar people. It would require the support of the religious leaders of the country in order to work - both Sunni and Shi'a - and somehow it would have to look like it wasn't put in place by the US or the UK, or nobody would accept it.
This is a really interesting idea. Would I be right in saying that it boils down to "give the power to those that already have it and leave well alone"? - CorkScrew
Well, possibly, yes. In the spirit of making a workable tribal state. It also amounts to combining Vitenka's first two solutions ^^;; - and there's the problem of it being massively unfair despite being possibly workable. --Requiem
I suppose that the few starving wounded cases left after each lot tries Rwanda-style genocide on the others wouldn't cause much trouble, no. --ChiarkPerson
Pretty much. It might be interesting to see if we can work out a transition to workable CityStates? without causing such massacres, but I'm not really sure how. I tihnk there's no general way to do it - any such plan would need a lot more 'on the street' knowledge than I have. --Vitenka
Like I said. Although the idea is that the potential militia leaders have a stake in the actual government and the ringleaders are carted off to talk to the other ringleaders rather than sitting around throwing polemic at each other. It's what Iraq would degenerate into if all the 'official' government pulled out - so from a certain perspective, why not cut out the middle man? --Requiem (known for creating about 6 wrong answers before a correct solution to any problem)
Oh - and something moderately similar works in the Arab Emirates (IIRC). --Requiem
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