And once again Senator Biden is ignored in favor of the usual, pull out and make the Iraqis compromise (never mind that they clearly have ZERO actual incentive to compromise).

While it has flaws Senator Biden’s call for a ‘soft partition’ of Iraq is just about the only thing I’ve seen that has a ghost of chance of decreasing (I’m not dumb enough to say stopping) the violence. It at least recognizes the reality on the ground. Iraqis are already withdrawing into ethnic and regional groupings. There is no real basis or mechanism to create compromise between groups that have been shooting at each other for the past four years. The Iraqi government is a joke that has minimal authority. Look what’s happened to the ‘grand compromise’ on oil revenue sharing touted a few weeks ago. Oh wait, NOTHING has happened.

Like it or not Obama is correct, we have NO good choices in Iraq. Too many mistakes have been made and we as a nation are frankly unwilling to commit the level of resources it would take to actually fix Iraq (400,000+ troops committed to a multi-decade mission along with the commensurate economic and reconstruction aid – think of Japan and Germany after WWII). And we have burned far too many bridges among our former friends and allies.

Vague talk of ‘regional peacekeeping’ or ‘international peacekeeping’ forces are naïve at best. NO NATION outside the US has the capability of deploying the 100s of thousands troops necessary to actually secure Iraq and keep them on station for any length of time. Look at the difficulty NATO is having keeping troops in Afghanistan (and even there the US is still the largest force and provides the bulk of the logistical support for all the other member nations). Using a regional force also makes little sense. Saudi Arabia and Iran are NOT friends and are quite likely to use their troops to protect their allies in Iraq creating a real potential for a shooting war to break out between those nations.

While it sounds and frankly is ugly, partitioning Iraq into three (maybe more) semi-autonomous zones has the best (meaning least worst) chance of slowing the violence or at least containing it to Iraq. The idea of the US military enforcing an ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Iraq is repugnant but honestly we are doing that now with the ‘Surge’ in Bagdad.

There are significant problems with this plan. The Sunnis will basically get screwed (which is going to happen the second after we pull out anyway making this a moot point). At least with this plan they get a chance at some self-determination within their own region.

The South will be heavily influenced by Iran, which will ratchet up tensions with Saudi Arabia on the border. Again this is happening now and will continue regardless of what we do.

We’ll have to figure our some way to keep Turkey from freaking out over an even more independent Kurdistan. Quite possibly we’ll need to bribe Turkey with massive economic aid. But again this is happening NOW.

And of course this plan will almost certainly require that thousands of US forces stay to maintain the buffer zones between the regions at least for the next few years.

Of course nothing in this approach precludes beefing up our regional diplomacy or reengaging with Syria and Iran.

Again, this not a good solution. To be honest, it’s a bad solution. Hell to be really honest it’s not even a real solution just a temporary band aid like everything else in the Middle East. But it’s a hell of lot more realistic and workable than most of the vague stuff offered by most of the other candidates.

What the hell is so bad about Russia wanting to have control over its most valuable national resource and not have to give all the profits to western oil executives? I find it hard to weep for BP in these circumstances given how their reaping enormous profits on the backs of many poor nations. Yeltsin did effectively ‘give away the farm’ to foreign oil companies for very little gain to Russia’s citizens (and considerable loss). The Russia seeks to reverse that mistake should surprise no one.

Besides, if one is going to go after Putin, spend your time talking about his ‘mini-purges’ of opposition journalists and his efforts to take control over former Soviet Republics. There you have a real argument.

One of the big problems with modern sports coverage is that is increasingly no longer geared to actual sports fans. More and more networks are trying to ‘grow’ their audiences. The assumption is that they need more ‘human interest’ angles in order to draw in larger audiences (read women). This has come at the expense of deeper analysis and more talk during the games about stuff outside the game (‘his barber’s second cousin has cancer’).

This began with the Olympics and all the little human interest stories they cover as opposed to the actual sports (‘the person in 18th place has a hangnail truly a portrait in courage’). Regrettably this trend has spread from the Olympics into mainstream sports like Basketball, Baseball and Football.

The irony of course is that instead of growing the audience they’ve started to shrink it. Non-sports fans still don’t watch and the real sports fans are put off by all the human interest crap getting in the way of the actual game.