This is easy. Simply split the country up the way it was before the British went in. Give the leaders of Iraq a time frame to put their 300,000 troops into action and tell them we are done. Handle it!!!!! We're outta here.
Who is going to enforce such a split to keep the Medhi Army from moving into the Sunni areas or the Sunnis from trying to take over the Shia areas.
Biden's plan for Iraq is massively dumb and would actually require more US troops to enforce such a split.
The Medhi Army and the Sunni insurgents want conquest they don't want their own portion of land where they can live in peace.
This approach takes as its basis the assumption that Iraq naturally falls into three parts. Supporters of it usually point to one of two mutually contradictory facts: Iraq has three main social groups (Sunni Arabs, Shiites, and Kurds), and the Iraqi state was formed in 1921 from three Ottoman vilayets or administrative districts. Iraq, advocates of this view say, is an artificial creation that would be more stable if we allowed it to fall back into its natural, trinary form.
To begin with, the fact that the Ottoman Empire chose to rule what is now Iraq via three administrative districts does not make the present Iraqi state an artificial creation. On the contrary, from prehistoric times the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the land between them have formed a single community, often composed of multiple ethnicities and religions but functioning as an economic and often political unit.
Ottoman administrative practice should not convince modern observers that Iraq is by nature a tripartite state. The Ottomans did not align territory according to modern concepts of national selfdetermination. They divided and conquered, as did most other empires. The notion of some preindependence Iraqi system in which each social group controlled its own area in peace is a myth. Any such tripartite structure would itself be an artificial innovation with no historical basis. The Ottoman vilayets (of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra) were not themselves homogeneous ethnic or sectarian groupings. Mosul, Baghdad, Baquba, and Kirkuk, four of Iraq’s principal cities, have long been mixed at both the metropolitan and the neighborhood level.
Even now, a high proportion of Iraqis live in mixed communities. Partitioning the country could only result from the migration of millions of people.
Many would resist. Bloodbaths would ensue. When this process occurred in the Balkans in the 1990s the international community called it “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” It is difficult to imagine how the United States and the international community could now accept and even propose a solution that they rightly condemned not a decade ago.
These principled considerations parallel practical concerns. Who would get Baghdad? The capital is now mixed between Sunni and Shia. Depriving one group of that city and giving it to another would create an obvious sense of victory and defeat between the groups—not something that bodes well for subsequent stability. If the international community sought to divide Baghdad, where would it draw the
line? The Tigris seems an obvious choice, but it has already become impossible. There are many Sunnis living east of the river and many Shiites living to the west. Jaysh al Mahdi fighters are working hard to seize more territory on the west bank and drive the Sunnis farther out. If the United States allows this process to continue, as advocates of partition suggest, America will de facto be giving Baghdad to the Shiites at the cost of the dislocation of 2 or 3 million Sunnis. Again, this is a process that can only come at the price of hideous suffering and death. Last, there is the problem of oil. The Kurds have oil fields. The Shiites have oil fields. The Sunni Arabs do not. Fear of the loss of oil revenue is one factor driving the Sunni insurgency now. Partitioning Iraq would make that fear a permanent reality. Why would the Sunnis stop fighting? They would not. Partition is not only a historical abomination and an invitation for sectarian
cleansing and genocide on a vast scale—it is also a recipe for perpetual conflict in Mesopotamia.
Iraq does not break down cleanly into Kurdish, Shia, or Sunni Arab areas either demographically or historically. Rather, within these broad categories there are serious fissures and rivalries which have been exploited by overlords (Ottoman, British, and Iraqi) to maintain central control. These rivalries will not disappear by a simple ethnic or sectarian realignment or oil sharing scheme. Shia factions will war with each other, and Shia violence could spill into other Arab Shia tribes in the region. Sunni tribal forces, urban Baathists, Islamic radicals, and other
interested states will not allow a peaceful Sunni heartland to be established, even if they could somehow be reconciled to a strip of the upper Euphrates and the Anbar desert. The integration of Kurds into this realignment, and the minority populations that live in Kurdish areas, is far more complicated than most observers recognize, starting with the fact that there are two rival Kurdish parties now, reflecting important linguistic and tribal distinctions. Considering the presence of large numbers of Turkmen,
Yazidi, and other minority groups in the lands that a partition would give to Kurdistan presents another set of problems that partitioning will only exacerbate.
From:
http://www.aei.org/docLib/20070105_ChoosingVictoryFINALcc.pdf