"Democracy is coming to them, but they are still in the process of absorbing it. You can compare it to what the United States was like in the 1850s."

- A member of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade, on the recent ethnic clashes in Northern Iraq between Kurds and Turkmen that have left at least nine dead

Was this historical analogy meant to reassure us? Up until this point, the Kurds have merely been saving their strength (and their bullets) until it was time to stand up and try to take what they always thought of as theirs. With the U.S. occupation hitting an all-time low, I'm imagining that a lot of potential secessionists in Iraq are wondering if that time hasn't come. We can barely manage a mostly indifferent Iraq - there's no chance in Hell we'll be able to keep this country from flying apart at the seams if it chooses to go that way, unless we're prepared as a nation to go through what our historian in the 173rd Airborne might compare to the 1860's. And being that half of America is already having second thoughts about this splendid little war in the Middle East, it's hard to imagine that there'd be any significant support for getting involved in a full-blown Iraqi civil war.