[etcetera]

"... a Kurdish in the north, an Arab Sunni in the center around Baghdad, and an Arab Shi'ite in the south around Basra."

This sounds good, but are the lucrative oil fields distributed accordingly?

[Teacher317]

Kinda like following the UN plan of Balkanization... hmmm...
That thought makes me lean against the idea.

[Cyrus the Great]

hell no!

[caltrop]

Nothing new here for those of us who've paid attention. In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings prior to our invasion all the experts, according to Senator Lugar, indicated Iraq would eventually split into its three historic partitions. The only ones out there who think it's a great idea to continue to force a round peg into a square hole are the neocons who've been calling the shots. While the neocons will try to spin the tarbaby we've wrapped our arms around in Iraq into some sort of victory, most of the world already recognizes we've lost GI's lives in a fool's errand, managed to accelerate the proliferation of nuclear weapons, tied down most of our Army, thrown away a mountain of money and increased the threat of terrorism all in one fell swoop.

[nosofar]

So perhaps the time has come to think about three Iraqi states: a Kurdish in the north, an Arab Sunni in the center around Baghdad, and an Arab Shi'ite in the south around Basra.

Sounds like the Assyrians are SOL.

[Billthedrill]

It would be a great idea if everything else were equal, but it isn't. Etcetera has already pointed out that the oil isn't evenly distributed; neither is the agriculture, the cities, or any of the other manifestations of wealth or potential wealth whose absence will serve as an impediment to the equitable splitting up of the country.

There's one more overweening factor here - it isn't our call. Despite all the hysterical blather to the contrary, we're not in an empire and we're not conquerors and they're not subjects. If they want to split the country let them.