Tommy Thompson's Idea for Iraq

I was listening to CSPAN's Road to the Whitehouse on Saturday. There was a Republican event going on - where the various Presidential hopefuls were making a speech. One of them was Tommy Thompson.

His idea for Iraq going forward was: "Look, these guys have been fighting for ages. Let's ask them if they want us there. If they don't let's leave. When we leave, let's give them the various factions what they want. The Kurds will move to Kurdistan for their own region, others will move to other parts of their country, and so on".

I thought raced my mind. Okay, let's do this... and then what? Should we hope it will be "lived happily ever after?"

I doubt it. Case in point: India-Pakistan.

That was a hastily drawn border as the English withdrew their occupation. A mass cross-border migration. Tensions. Bloodshed. Close to sixty years since, this is still a festering issue and a nuclear one.

I personally feel there's no point blaming the Iraqis that they aren't stepping up to fulfil their end of the equation. Such "stepping up" takes time. It has been sixty years since Pakistan has had its independence (with no occupation) but it still struggles with implementing a working democracy. These things take time. Quoting a well known Nobel Prize winner, democracy is not a dish you can cook in a "pressure cooker". In fact, to get to a democracy that works the way the US really proud of, it took the US over 100 years or more. In fact, the US had slavery & racial discrimination well into the early to mid-1900s.