Polly said:
Go Iraqis go, go go go! Join hands, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurdish people! Defend your land, defend your oil, defend your women and defend your children, defend what is rightfully yours from foreign greed and agression! Join hands and kick their butt, ...
This is a worthy goal to hope for. If the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds joined hands, the Iraq problem would be solved.
I don't think you have a good understanding the of the problem. When the borders of countries are arbitrarily set by outsiders, with no regard to the culture and history of the people within those borders, you get situations like Iraq.
One solution, and the most common, is for one person or group to become more powerful than the others and rule by oppression - that's the Saddam Hussein solution. It's been a short term method of stability in many of Europe's former colonies.
A second solution would be for the people within the borders to disregard them, since they had no say in them. This usually takes a war to establish each new country - that's the solution taken in Yugoslavia once the only person strong enough to implement the first solution died. That solution still could work in Iraq, but it will require a lot of bloodshed between the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites. It's further complicated by the interests of bordering countries. After enough years, the two regions with more resources (the Kurds and Shiites) would be strong enough to fend off challenges from the Sunnis, who would live in poverty since they have few resources.
The third would be your solution. Because of the disadvantages of the first two solutions (oppressive dictatorship or uncontrolled violence), all the groups would find some compromise where they could live together in peace as one country. Seeing as how stability doesn't make front page news, I'm not all that familiar with countries that have successfully implemented the third solution.
The US, Canada, China, India, and the old Soviet Union used to be the top five for having the most separate and distinct cultures living within their borders. Considering how the US has handled indigenous cultures existing within its borders, it wouldn't fit as an example of the third solution - it simply weakened the indigenous cultures to a point that they no longer even have to oppress them.
How about China and India?
I know at one time, India's solution was a very strict caste system, but how do they merge so many cultures into one country today? And was the caste system a necessary step along the way to bring enough stability that they could move slowly towards a third solution? (That wouldn't support the idea that Iraq could achieve the third solution just by establishing a democratic government - that it would still take years or decades, even with a legitimate government and a security infrastructure).
Does China actually incorporate all of its separate cultures into one government or is it a central government dominated by the strongest culture that imposes itself on the other cultures within the country? Or is it, too, just settling for stability in the hopes of creating an evnironment where the third solution might be achievable somewhere down the road?
You'll find google works fine for finding information, in fact it throws up 11,900 references to the report. Here's one of them for you (the first on the list). http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm
