Posted on 06/19/2014 3:34:39 PM PDT by xzins
The country of Iraq is, for all intents and purposes, dead and has been replaced by three successor states, former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden told Newsmax TV Wednesday.
"The state of Iraq as we know it is gone, and it's not going to be reconstituted," he told "The Steve Malzberg Show."
"We've got three successor states there now," Hayden, a retired four star Air Force general added. "As much as we might look for opportunities to keep Iraq together, we need to be prepared for the reality that it's not going to stay together.
"We should snuggle up comfortable with the Kurds in Kurdistan, who have always been pro-American and actually have a functioning society and state right now.
We should give help to the Maliki government, sufficient to settle the current conflict so it just doesn't turn into a humanitarian disaster," Hayden said.
"For example, there's fighting around Beiji right now, the oil refinery north of Baghdad. Baghdad needs that for that part of the country to survive, and so we've got to settle the lines of this conflict in a way that Nouri al-Maliki's surviving state, which I'll call Shiastan, has Beiji within it.
"Then we've got Sunnistan, and that's the state under the control of ISIS right now, and frankly, we've got to treat that as if it were a safe haven for terrorists and begin to think about it the way we had thought about Waziristan for the last decade-plus. That's a tough message, and I'm afraid that's where we are.
"Now we're at a point where we really don't have good options," Hayden told Malzberg.
Hayden said "Sunnistan" consists of western Iraq and eastern Syria. "There is no border now," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Three state solution is a joke, just as Joe Biden who suggested that nonsense.
Joe Biden was not the one that suggested that idea. It far pre-dates Joe Biden and was widely discussed on Free Republic long before Joe Biden.
It is “Iraq” that makes no sense. It was a map carve-out by the British after the Ottomans chose the wrong side in WWI. It ignored people groups.
Iraq is NOT an ancient country. It dates back only til right after WWI.
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