The End, for Now

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/opinion/friedman-the-end-for-now.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 10:11 AM
Subject: re:The End, for Now
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   Thomas Friedman's messianic hopes have clouded his political vision, again. Some of us remember Yugoslavia.  Tito's iron fist held Yugoslavia together for seventy years.  In his crucible, all talk of sectarian strife was suppressed. Jew married Serb, Serb married Croat, Croat married Bosnian...three times twenty-one years passed and a generation started thinking that this was the post-sectarian model for modernity.  But all of this dissolved in blood and tears in the nineties.   Yugoslavia had always  been an arbitrary chunk hewed from the corpse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, just as Iraq was a fragment hacked from the Ottoman empire.  

   When we ratified the charter of the United Nations, the U.S. pledged to support the National self-determination of peoples. That can't be served by yoking the Kurds to the Arabs for twenty-one years, or for seventy years.  Now that the U.S. troops are out of the way, Iraq will try to explode as surely as Yugoslavia did, and as messily.

Barry Haskell Levine