ADVOCATE FOR INSTABILITY: You leave They Call It Flit alone for a few days and Bruce comes back with a ton of good stuff, of which this is the tip of the iceberg:

As that recent New Yorker piece everyone’s talking about amply demonstrates, Iraqi Kurdistan is the closest thing to a pro-American Muslim state that exists in the region. Yet Wilsonian determinism dictates it must forever be under the thumb of whoever rules in Baghdad. This is clearly unacceptable. The biggest destabilizing act the U.S. could create right now (and easily defendable at home and abroad) is not this silly pretext of UN inspectors vis-a-vis Iraq, but the recognition of Kurdistan as its own country, backed by American occupying force. The impact would be to send ripples through the whole regional system, not to mention cripple Iraq far more than inspectors would. But that’s what you do when the chess pieces are lined up for a stalemate: you upset the board. The short-run result could be blowback, and even a regional war, but the long-term result, as the strength of the western economic system and the energy of the resurgent Kurds, inevitably made itself felt, would be a deep penetration of American values into all the immediately surrounding countries and beyond, leading hopefully to a series of internal revolutions in other countries that America could then capitalize on down the road. In the meantime, the threat of weapons of mass destruction would likely be lifted off both America and Israel, as the Arab countries focussed on this new, more urgent threat.

Read Bruce's three-part analysis sequentially: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.