Washington Post Editorial on Partition

Richard Cohen Argues That Partition is Inevitable

If proof were needed that the story of Bosnia' war is still being fought over, here it is--an Op-Ed from the Sept. 25, 2007 Washington Post arguing for the partition of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish states. And note that Cohen uses the Republika Srpska as one example of partition.

He claims that Bosnia and places like it break apart because different ethnic groups "cannot get along." This is the sort of simple-minded, myopic, and ahistorical pseudo-analysis which was used to justify inaction and disengagement during the war. It would be nice of Cohen could acknowledge the absence of centralized control and the degredation of civic culture in Iraq. It would also be helpful--and honest--if he were to acknowledge that while both Yugoslavia and Iraq were modern nation-states, the complex multicultural societies they contained were much, much older, and had lived with varying degrees of intermixture for centuries.

Opponants of intervention often accused pro-interventionists of being naive, supporting an idealized multi-cultural Bosnia where everybody held hands and got along swimmingly. "Realists" like Cohen, however, live in a world where every breakdown in civil order can be ascribed to the same, one-size-fits-all root cause of "ancient ethnic hatred."