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Peter Galbraith is a longtime lobbyist for an independent Kurdistan and not surprisingly his prescription for extricating ourselves from Iraq is to use American military and political muscle to protect Kurdistan while the rest of Iraq continues to descend into an ever bloodier civil war. Both Galbraith and Salon should have had the honesty to indicate that he is no neutral observer on the matter of Kurdistan.
Galbraith also seems to forget that Southern Iraq has vast oil and natural gas deposits (larger than Kurdistan's) and that no administration is going to blithely walk away from that and hand them over to pro-Iranian extremists. After all control over Iraq's vast oil reserves was one of the main albeit unspoken motivations behind this war. Galbraith can choose to continue to believe in the WMD or spreading democracy rationale but they have never been more than a mere sideshow. Given the current tightness in the oil markets this remains a potent rationale for "staying the course" towards a semi-functional but oil-exporting Iraq and I don't see things changing anytime soon.
