From Juan Cole:

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder says that the passage of the constitution may not halt Iraq's slide into civil war and partition. (Since the Sunni Arabs overwhelmingly rejected it, the charter is at the very least not a force for national unity!) He quotes a US official saying, "Maybe they just have to have their civil war" and commenting that it is a "way of life" "over here."

I see. So the US invades Iraq, overthrows the government, dissolves the army, appoints an ethnically determined government, backs fundamentalist Shiite parties and Kurdish parties against the interests of the Sunni Arabs. And now it is the Iraqis' fault that there is communal violence, because they are just like that "over here." Well, you can't say that Orientalist stereotypes aren't at least useful as fig leafs for imperial SNAFUs.

Shahin M. Cole observed today, "Partition is the consequence of failed colonialism."