It appears not to be unthinkable, not least by the oracles at the NYT. The WSWS today:
[...]
The New York Times Sunday carried an article entitled "The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq," which indicated that the options under discussion include what amounts to support for a genocidal war against Iraq's Sunni population as well as the deliberate unleashing of a region-wide sectarian conflict between the predominantly Sunni Arab countries and the Shia majorities in Iran and Iraq.
This proposal—known widely in Washington as the "80 percent solution," the percentage of the Iraqi population comprising Shia and Kurds—the Times writes, "basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they're likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni."
The plan reportedly has been promoted by Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of the Iraq war from the beginning.
A key consideration, the article adds, is control of Iraq's oil fields. "The longer America tries to woo the Sunnis, the more it risks alienating the Shiites and Kurds, and they're the ones with the oil," the Times states. "A handful of administration officials have argued that Iraq is not going to hold to together and will splinter along sectarian lines. If so, they say, American interests dictate backing the groups who control the oil-rich areas."
An off-shoot of the plan, which the Times cynically describes as something "some hawks have tossed out in meetings," is a suggestion that the US could reap the benefits of a region-wide sectarian conflagration. "America could actually hurt Iran by backing Iraq's Shiites; that could deepen the Shiite-Sunni split and eventually lead to a regional Shiite-Sunni war," the Times writes. "And in that, the Shiites—and Iran—lose because, while there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq and Iran, there are more Sunnis than Shiites almost everywhere else."
[...]
full: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/iraq-d18.shtml
More of Condi's "birth pangs"?...
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam