Here is my plan for Iraq.<\/p>\n
1) Use existing political subdivisions, or create new ones based on religious majorities, to partition Iraq into semi-autonomous ‘states’ or provinces.<\/p>\n
2) Identify leading civic or religious groups within each political subdivision.<\/p>\n
3) Promise a population-based share of Iraq’s oil revenues to the local authorities if and only if they can accomplish the following within their own subdivision:<\/p>\n
a) stop street violence<\/p>\n
b) improve the delivery of basic economic services such as electricity, water, waste disposal<\/p>\n
c) organize local public services such as police, fire, ambulance, roads and health care<\/p>\n
d) begin weapons confiscation programs<\/p>\n
e) ban inflammatory religious or political rhetoric<\/p>\n
These local authorities will be funded from Iraq’s oil revenues. If human nature has not changed, this promise of a fair share of the enormous (and yes, still only potential) wealth that could be generated from Iraq’s oil reserves will motivate the people of Iraq to get their act together as no “shock and awe” or “hearts and minds” campaign has been able to do so far.<\/p>\n
Has this solution been tried yet? NO. Big oil, and their political lapdogs in the US, have prevented any discussion of this type of solution. Give peace a chance? Naw, let’s give money a chance!<\/p>\n
Steve<\/p>\n
politics at cantondailynews dot com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here is my plan for Iraq. 1) Use existing political subdivisions, or create new ones based on religious majorities, to partition Iraq into semi-autonomous ‘states’ or provinces. 2) Identify leading civic or religious groups within each political subdivision. 3) Promise a population-based share of Iraq’s oil revenues to the local authorities if and only if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cantondailynews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cantondailynews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cantondailynews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cantondailynews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cantondailynews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cantondailynews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cantondailynews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cantondailynews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cantondailynews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}