Cut and run

[Watser?]

I still don't think breaking the country up in threes is a very good solution. The Sunnis will never go along with it for one, because they are the ones getting screwed in the deal. They are in an area of the country that has hardly any oil, except in Kirkuk. Which brings me to a second problem: Kirkuk is already hotly contested between Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds, it could become the Srebrenica of Iraq when one of the parties gets strong enough to get away with that militarily. A third problem is that the neighbors will not accept it, especially the Turks, but Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria will not be happy either. If the Kurdish area becomes any more independent than it is now, the Turks are likely to invade. At the very least there will be cross-border sheling and raids, the Turks and the Iranians have been shelling camps of Turkish and Iranian Kurdish militants in the past. And last but not least, some of the Shi'ite factions are not happy with partition either, the Mahdi Army in particular.

There is big internal Shi'ite trouble brewing and sometimes exploding already anyway. The fighting in Amara is classified as Mahdi Army against the police/government, but this is misleading. The problem is that the police is not above the parties but heavily infiltrated by the Badr Corps (SCIRI's militia). It is better described as a turf war between two powerful Shi'ite factions. This kind of conflict will not be solved by cutting up the country, neither will the fight for Kirkuk or the Sunni insurrection. If anything it is very likely to make all of it worse.
In fact The Mahdi Army local leader in Amara said the confederacy plan adopted last week is one of the causes for the fighting there:

Ahmad al-Sharifi, a Sadrist leader, told al-Zaman that the fighting in Amara is one of the consequences of the law on provincial confederacies passed last week by the Iraqi parliament, to which the Sadr Movement was opposed.

Juan Cole

At this point I don't have any answers, except a major diplomatic initiative involving the Arab league, all the neighboring countries and all the Iraqi parties/factions/militias.

[godfry n. glad]

Originally Posted by Watser?

At this point I don't have any answers, except a major diplomatic initiative involving the Arab league, all the neighboring countries and all the Iraqi parties/factions/militias.

It's a jump ball, then.

Even in that company, somebody will have to pull the Turks off the Kurds and keep the Azeris from taking a chunk outta Iran.

Actually, as I perceive the current national borders to be European powers' artificial imposition. Who knows what the Armenians would want?