When the future of Iraq is discussed, people who know a lot about Iraq (and people who don’t, but let’s discount them) frequently discuss a break-up of the country as if it would be a terribly bad thing.

I understand that the Turks might not welcome an independent Kurdistan, but can’t see why anyone else would object to creating a relatively sensible new country in the Middle East. I also find it hard to see why we should force Sunnis and Shias to co-exist in the rest of the country: why not split Iraq into a Kurdish north, a Sunni middle, and a Shia south?

Coalition troops could ensure that the inevitable ethnic homogenisation of each region came about through migration rather than through genocide; the end result would be three stable states instead of one festering mess of hatred and old-score-settling…

I’m sure there are good reasons why this wouldn’t work. I’d be interested to know what they are, however.

There’s not a lot left to say about the attacks on Spain. In short:

* They’re a terrible thing

* We’ll probably never know whether or not they were provoked/hastened by Spain’s support for the invasion of Iraq

* The government lost the election for some combination of four reasons: the bombing led to increased turnout (which generally favors leftwing parties, although poll data doesn’t necessarily support this in Spain); the government attempted to mislead the Spanish people that the attackers were ETA; people perceived that government support for the Iraq invasion drove the attack; and the Socialists were slightly ahead even before the bombings.

Anyway, enough of that. I’m going to focus on American writer Michael Morris, who is an idiot.

Mr Morris is upset because after September 11, some British people suggested that American foreign policy might have contributed to the attacks, and some British people pointed out that Americans might want to rethink their long-time support for the IRA. He thinks it’s most unfair that when the Spanish bombs went off, the British reaction was to support the Spanish wholeheartedly without raising such points.

However, he seems to miss the reasons for this: that (since the Americans took away all their colonies a hundred years ago) the Spanish don’t have a record of brutal and abusive foreign policy; and that rather than backing the IRA the Spanish have long suffered exactly the same problems from their homegrown regionalist terrorists.

(he also thinks it’s churlish of the British not to support the country which sacrificed to much to save us from the Nazis during WWII. I agree that Russia doesn’t get enough support or credit in the UK, but I don’t think this is his point…)

Certainly, a worryingly large proportion of SBBS visitors appear to be – not least because the site is now top 10 for “necrophiliac” in a wide variety of search engines.

In other news, the fucking of cunts, girls from Cuba, and “illegal kinki little girls” all remain popular amongst SBBS visitors. And I’m not sure whether or not the person looking for an “illegal copy of Zoo Tycoon” should be placed into the same category or not.

Not deviant but merely deranged is the Canadian who searched for “India’s Churchill’s brother soccer team”. There I was thinking that both Sir Winston and the Subcontinent preferred cricket…

I hope it made hearts in general grow fonder.

I’ve been in India for a few weeks; now I’m back. Some posts will follow, when I’ve cleared my backlog of work and of sleep deprivation enough that I have the time and ability to compose coherent arguments.

In the meantime, it’s good to see the Irish press striking a blow against heretical theories of heliocentricity.