Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
Certainly true, but with or without recognition, those who control must sooner or later begin to govern, and when that happens money makes a difference. I was just responding to Outlaw's claim that the ingredients for a viable State were already in place, which seemed to me exaggerated.
See Dayuhan part of the problem is your thinking---it does not reflect actual Iraq ie Arab thinking both on the ground and throughout the ME.

The actual parts are now in place for a separate creation of a Sunni and Kurdish state---that is what needs to be understood---it is not your ideas of a state nor mine--it is what a targeted population feels that state should reflect.

That is why we have gotten this so wrong---we went in assuming that we could change things based on our western assumptions but forgot along the way the actual population that was being affected has a big say in events on the ground.

We ignored starting in mid 2005 the Shia revenge killings which were really ethnic cleansing because we in the west could not fathom "ethnic cleansing ever occurring in front of our noses"---when we did wake up in 2007 what did we have to do--surge and then we "celebrated" the surge as what "a victory"?

If victory is defined as finally waking up and realizing we made a mistake then I guess it was a "victory of sorts".

By the way did you finally get the symbolism of the Green Crescent paralleling the old Silk Road---that goes to the heart today of the regional hegemony fight between Iran and the KSA but we hide it in the Sunni/Shia divide debate.