Wanted for nation-building: actual nations, not pretend ones

■"The Afghan Difference," editorial, New York Times, 22 September 2005, p. A30.

The NYT editorial wonders aloud why Afghan the nation-building experiment goes reasonably well while only "the most die hard Bush administration spinners pretend to see any significant and lasting gains in Iraq."

"One reason," we are told, is that Afghanistan actually has a "long and continuous history as a single nation," meaning not one invented by colonial masters to cover their tracks as they left the scene, like Yugoslavia or Iraq.

Still, Yugoslavia emerges from its wars of the 1990s with a number of viable functioning states. Still residual ethnic hatreds and economic development proceeds slowly enough, but functioning all right, and moving toward the Core more and more.

So Afghanistan does all right as a nation because it's actually a coherent nation, and Yugoslavia does okay when it breaks back down to its constituent parts, but Iraq is a full-blown failure because we couldn't keep that pretend state together, instead seeing it fall into three parts: 1) a Kurdistan that's been a wonderfully functioning state for years now, thanks to the no-fly-zone the U.S. provided across the 1990s; 2) a Shiite region that's moving toward constitutional agreement with Kurdistan for a federated Iraq and which has, so far, resisted the impulse for war against Sunnis who have targeted them unceasingly in terrorist violence; and 3) the basket case that is the Sunni portions.

If Iraq the unitary state was the goal, then yes, we have failed, but that was a stupid and unrealistic goal from the start, and why anyone wants to compare it to Afghanistan on that basis instead of the now defunct and broken-up Yugoslavia is beyond me.

Iraq is not the failure it is made out to be. Sunni land is a complete failure, but Shiite land and Kurdistan are not.