Thomas Sowell has a piece in today's Wall Street Journal (available here for free).
Sowell's thesis is that the reason Iraq has been a sectarian mess is because it's, gasp, too diverse.
That word [diversity] has become a sacred mantra, endlessly repeated for years on end, without a speck of evidence being asked for or given to verify the wonderful benefits it is assumed to produce.
Worse yet, Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. These include "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent in 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by Turks during World War I.
Despite much gushing about how we should "celebrate diversity," America's great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries. Americans have by no means escaped diversity's oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in.
Because for most of our history we've had a common heritage and language, the U.S. has be E Pluribus Unum (which does not mean, as Al Gore once said, out of one, many). Iraq was formed after World War I by drawing lines on a map:
[Iraq] has never had the cohesion of nations that evolved over the centuries out of the experiences of peoples who worked out their own modi vivendi in one way or another.
Sowell, of course, knows now that we're stuck there, we'd better finish th job:
However we got into Iraq, we cannot undo history--even recent history--by simply pulling out and leaving events to take their course in that strife-torn country. Whether or not we "stay the course," terrorists are certainly going to stay the course in Iraq and around the world.
Political spin may say that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, but the terrorists themselves quite obviously believe otherwise, as they converge on that country with lethal and suicidal resolve.
Whether we want to or not, we cannot unilaterally end the war with international terrorists. Giving the terrorists an epoch-making victory in Iraq would only shift the location where we must face them or succumb to them.
Abandoning Iraqi allies to their fate would ensure that other nations would think twice before becoming or remaining our allies. With a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon, we are going to need all the allies we can get.
But Sowell's main theme, that "diversity" is not the end-all be-all wonder the left makes it out to be is the important part. The U.S. assimilated immigrants: they learned English, took on our culture (while in many cases keeping elements of their own, giving us Irish Wakes, Scandinavian Smorgasbords, and Chinese New Years).
It's diversity that makes it possible to hate your neighbor. Just this morning, for some reason, I was thinking about Robert Heinlein's novel Friday. Science Fiction, set in the future, at a time when the U.S. is fragmented. There's a political upheaval in one section of the former U.S., and those now in power sought to secure their power by a most effective means:
Democrats were being rounded up, sentenced by drumhead courts-marshal (provost's tribunals they were called) and executed on the spot--laser, gunfire, some hangings. They were sentencing them down to age fourteen . . . one family in which both parents, themselves condemned, were insisting their son was only twelve.
The President of the court, an Imperial Police corporal, ended the argument by drawing his side arm, shooting the boy, and then ordered his squad to finish off the parents and the boy's older sister.
Couldn't happen in America? I think thats what they said about Germany circa 1929.