Iraq: don't pull out, break up

I've long argued that the result of our intervention in Iraq will not be the democratisation of the country as much as it's eventual disintegration. I honestly believe that in ten years time there will be no country called Iraq.

Today, I notice in Guardian Comment, that David Goodhart has been brave enough to state this publicly.

Britain should not pull out of Iraq and allow it to dissolve into real civil war, as Michael Ancram has just suggested. We should instead help to break it up. The continued failure to form a government in Iraq shows that radical federalism is now the only long-term solution. Iraq's three main groups - Sunnis, Shias and Kurds - will have to agree to disagree and to lessen their claims on one another, acknowledging that 85 years after the British first tried to create it, the country still lacks the basis of a centralised European-style nation state. The belief that Saddam's brutality was the glue that held together the fragmented mosaic of Iraq has proved true.

Iraq's fragmentation has been on the cards ever since the US allowed the Shias to construct a constitution based on Federalism that permitted any future oil finds to be allocated to the region that it resides in rather than to the country as a whole. Promising the once dominant Sunnis no more than lots of sand as their eventual inheritance.

Even this outcome does not guarantee peace as the Sunnis are unlikely to accept such meagre offerings. However, faced with an almost unavoidable civil war, it may come to be viewed as the best of the offers currently on the table.

No doubt Blair and Bush will continue in their push for democracy in the country that their foolish interventions have torn apart, but eventually even they will have to see the writing that is on the wall.

They invaded a country who's culture and history they did not understand, armed with no more than their foolhardy belief that democracy is the opposite of tyranny, and that to remove a tyrant is to open the door for unavoidable democratic reform.

Their plan was flawed. For the basic assumption on which they invaded was false.

The opposite of tyranny is not democracy, it is anarchy. And that is what they have unleashed across Iraq.

Now Iraq lies broken. I am reminded of the old children's nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty. "All the King's horses and all the King's men, couldn't put Humpty together again."

And so it is with Iraq. No matter how they try, the pieces won't fit.

That is the true legacy of the worst British foreign policy intervention since Suez. We have destroyed that which we set out to save.

Tags: Iraq, fragmentation, US, UK, Britain, Shia, Sunni, Kurd,