BUT HERE'S THE OPERATIVE QUESTION... (via Gene Brown):

Remembering Partition: The parallels between India '47 and Iraq '07. (Fred Kaplan, Aug. 9, 2007, Slate)

Anyone who believes that U.S. troops can simply and suddenly leave Iraq without risk of unleashing great horror—or who regards religious or ethnic partition as a solution instead of a desperate ploy—should look back at the summer of 1947, when the British Empire packed up and India fulfilled its "tryst with destiny" (as Jawaharlal Nehru described its awakening to independence), only to plunge into a monstrous spree of ethnic cleansing (12 million people uprooted, as many as 1 million murdered) that continues to take its toll today.

As India's independence and Britain's withdrawal seemed inevitable in the wake of World War II, the country's long-suppressed internal fissures began to rumble like a reawakened volcano. Gandhi's followers in the Congress Party campaigned as a secular movement. But Muslims saw it as a cover for Hindu domination, and Gandhi's rival, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, though a secular Muslim, played the religion card to the hilt to attract fundamentalists' favor.

The Muslims demanded an independent state. In their haste to get out, the British complied. They negotiated the establishment of Pakistan, drew the boundaries in a careless manner, and unavoidably created more problems than they solved.

On Aug. 15, when the British pulled out, millions of Hindus on Muslim land and Muslims on Hindu land—and lots of Sikhs on either—were brutalized, raped, or killed. Many packed their belongings and moved, but, unprotected, they were slaughtered along the way. The Indian Army, which had been created by Britain, also divided along religious lines, and, as the New Yorker review notes, "many of the communalized soldiers would join their coreligionists in killing sprees, giving the violence of partition its genocidal cast."

Before long, India and Pakistan went to war over the contested territory of Kashmir. Two more wars followed in as many decades. Another war nearly broke out a mere five years ago.

...how many Pakistanis ands Indians would reverse the partition? Or, for that matter, how many Brits and Americans would reverse our bloody own?

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 11, 2007 9:27 PM