Transcript
MICHAEL E. O'HANLON: First of all, when people say why would you ever want to do soft partition, it's not what Iraqis want. It's not historically what's been supported by their public opinion polls or by most of their politicians. The answer in simple terms, in short, is it's happening anyway. Going back to the first bombing of the Samarra mosque in February, 2006, I think Iraq has been in a civil war. It's not an all-out civil war. Things could get a whole lot worse which is one of our arguments against withdrawal options which are often advocated in the American debate. But it's happening in the sense that you are getting 50,000 to 100,000 people a month displaced from their homes by violence.
Here, we are greatly appreciative of the Internally Displaced Persons work at Brookings, the project run out of the Foreign Policy Studies Program here in consultation with Bern, Switzerland because they really have documented a lot of this more carefully than many others. If you count internally displaced persons and refugees since February 2006, you're seeing 50,000 to 100,000 people a month violently displaced from their homes, either at the point of a gun or out of fear of that happening to them next.
So Iraq is becoming Bosnia. The question in our minds pretty soon or maybe already is: Are you going to try to control that process through negotiation if at all possible or let it play out to its tragic violent conclusion first and then negotiate soft partition later with another million people dead?
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