Cosma Shalizi's latest post

The erudite Cosma Shaliziwrites about Iraq:
"If James Wimberley can invoke Timur-i-Lang for a discussion of climate change, I feel free to resurrect his old interlocutor, the great historian and pioneering social scientist ibn Khaldun, in regards to our strategy in Iraq.
.....
Why is the United States government unable to impose its will on Iraq? It is because it has too few soldiers, too far from home, among too alien a population. (If our army of occupation was a million soldiers strong, the fact that almost none of them can make themselves understood would be much less of a problem.) Some have suggested that the problem is insufficient will or solidarity on the American side, but this seems implausible; assuming we actually want there to be an Iraqi population to govern, simply killing more of them is unlikely to work (never mind the moral issues). What ibn Khaldun would advise, I think, is to find an Iraqi group which is numerous, has the solidarity needed to dominate the rest of Iraqi society, and can be brought into alliance with us; and he would advise us to look at either the deserts or the mountains. I submit that there is exactly one group which fulfills the necessary conditions: the Kurds.

They comprise a reasonable fraction of the Iraqi population; their effective 'asabiyya is demonstrated by the fact their militias, a.k.a. peshmerga, already control Iraqi Kurdistan militarily; and they have, notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the 1970s and 1980s, a by-now long-standing alliance with us. Our strategy, then, should be to offer them our support in a bid for military and political domination over the rest of Iraq — with the understanding that they are to leave Turkey strictly alone. That is, they not only get Kirkuk, they get Baghdad and Basra, and not just the north's oil but all of Iraq's oil. Of course, this will be horribly undemocratic and bloody, and it will make anyone even remotely sympathetic with Arab nationalism hate us even more, but I suspect many in Washington would view those attributes as features rather than bugs in any policy."
Strange.
P.S. (17th March, 2005). Just noticed a update where Cosma says that he is not seriously advocating this.