ARTICLE: "Divided They Stand, but on Graves," by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 19 August 2007, p. W1.

As I have penned many times, Iraq is Yugoslavia done backwards: instead of letting the cleansing go on for years and then intervening to topple the dictator holding together the fake state, in Iraq we took down the dictator first and now find ourselves enduring that fake state's ongoing soft-but-bloody partition.

Bosnia can't be a model, we are told, because there is no Shiastan or Sunnistan, and the only way to get one is to allow a lot of bloodshed or to force 20 percent of the population to move as a result of an agreement.

But since there is no political will for such an agreement, especially so long as we stay, the slo-mo cleansing seems the only alternative, along with Americans lost trying to tamp down on it.

That seems equally bad, especially since Sunnis and Shias are nowhere near exhaustion.

In the end, no one wants partition but the Kurds, hence my call for the 2K solution: draw down and pull back in southern Iraq and move bulk of forces to Kurdistan (where we are small) and Kuwait (where we are already large) and simply wait out the Sunni-Shia fight, which our generals on the ground don't want because they'd view that path as their operational failure. But frankly, political requirements (i.e., protecting our public's willingness to stay militarily engaged in the region) should overrule that professional desire. Political leaders don't tell generals how to fight, but they should--in our system--tell them when our fight has logically concluded.

By releasing the Sunni-Shia dogs of war, we force Saudi Arabia and Iran to fish or cut bait. Whatever they choose, we save our troops' lives and our political will to remain engaged.

That's not defeatism. That's keeping your eye on the prize: not some illusory "victory" in Iraq, but a region transformed--one way or another.