The Expletive Deleted Principle

The New York Times is publicizing a long talked about idea in Iraq that they call the Darwin Principle. I have another name for it but I can't print the two word expletive, the first word of which is Dumb. Some ironist at the NYT has titled the story The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq. So what's the idea?
The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.

Sorry, Sunnis.

The Darwin Principle is radical, decisive and most likely not going anywhere. But the fact that it has even been under discussion, no matter how briefly, says a lot about the dearth of good options facing the Bush administration and the yearning in this city for some masterstroke to restore optimism about the war.

There are a lot of reasons why this is a really bad idea, among them the fact that our allies are all Sunni and Iran is Shia.

If America has problems now with Muslim extremists around the world, those would likely worsen if the United States was believed to have aided the uprooting or extermination of Iraq’s Sunni population.


This idea is stupid enough for Bush and Cheney to like it. The most obvious contrast this plan would have compared to simply leaving posthaste is that we would get (and deserve) all the blame for the genocide, and a lot more American soldiers would get killed in the process.

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