Iraq in three pieces ... as desired by Iraq's own Government Ministers

It's not just coming from outside of Iraq anymore, but from some of the most prominent of the Iraqi ministers in the parliament and even in Maliki's own cabinet -- the democratically elected Government that GWB has mentioned so often in his statements.

My brother, Richard from Connecticut, has been telling me that this is inevitable for some time now, and I've kind of poo-poo'ed it with my own belief that, although the Kurds could easily be isolated as a "country" of its own, the Shiites and Sunnis would be impossible to untangle into the other two "pieces."

But a new idea has arisen from the very government that we put in place. It's less a Shiite - Sunni division than it's a division between those areas of the country that are "upgrading and improving" (mostly Shiite) and those that are "incubating terrorism" (mostly Sunni).

In Peter Galbraith's book (previous post) entitled, The End of Iraq, he referred to it as a "coerced unity, making constant reference to Saddam Hussein's imposition of unity on a generally unstable unity, of sorts.

My brother, Richard, quotes Colin Powell as stating (in regards to Iraq), "we broke it; we have to fix it." But as I see it, it's more like Humpty-Dumpty having fallen off the Saddam-created wall. He (Humpty-Dumpty = Iraq) is splattered at best and we (they) just might mop up the mess into three (still pretty messy) globs that just might survive -- but for sure, many, many future US servicemen and women would survive.