Simultaneously, influential neoconservative US officials saw an opportunity here to pursue hair-brained ambitions to re-engineer the region through the de facto ethno-sectarian partition of Iraq into three autonomous cantons: a vision that could not be achieved without considerable covert violence.
In an Iraq with no history or culture of multi-ethno-sectarian democracy, partition is the probably only pragmatic route to stability and prosperity, unless of course a ruthless dictator, such as Saddam, is brought back.
In an interview with the London-based al-Hayat newspaper, veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi played down the risk of sectarian and ethnic partition of Syria, but said: "What I am afraid of is worse... the collapse of the state and that Syria turns into a new Somalia".
Mr. Modi, 57, is a cult figure to his followers, but a pariah to most outside his party, largely because of the upheaval in Gujarat, one of the worst outbreaks of sectarian violence since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.
In Basra, the British forces who withdrew this week from the palace to the airport found themselves incapable of shaping events in the city once their numbers dwindled below the level at which they could impose their will on the streets (see article).If the main affliction of Iraq is a sectarian civil war, might partition be the solution?
The pressures of colonialism and its aftermath, of Partition, war and sectarian violence, the natural disasters of flood and famine and disease -- none of these seem to touch Malgudi in any permanent way.
The Iraq war endures as ancient sectarian animosities and suspicions fuel partition and domestic strife.
He said such an arrangement would be inappropriate given that Iraq does not have the history of ethnic or sectarian strife that has led to partition of states in other parts of the world.
The U.S.-Saudi conversation about Iraq requires deep thinking in light of the likelihood that Iraq could fall prey again to sectarian infighting, terrorism, and prospects for partition.
However, there are also some who see Iraqi events as the beginning of collapse, partition, fragmentation, and bloody sectarian warfare in the entire Arab region.
