Will Iraq succeed where Belgium has failed?

MARWAN IBRAHIM/AFP/Getty Images

Andrew Stuttaford, writing on The National Review‘s The Corner blog, thinks my support for Belgian unity is naive:

Belgium, he writes was “supposed to be what the European Union was all about—an attempt to move past the cultural and linguistic differences that had caused the continent centuries of bloodshed and create a new pan-European identity based on economic cooperation and political compromise,” a sentence that, I fear, over-simplifies the EU and misunderstands Belgium, an artificial entity defined by inter-communal tension and spoils-systems politics. […] It’s time to end this farce. 

So, Stuttaford thinks that nations without a defining cultural unity are doomed to failure? Can we then assume that he thinks it’s time to “end the farce” of trying to prop up a central government in Iraq? Consider this Stuttaford line from an October, 2006 discussion on troop levels:

I never envisaged that the Americans would ignore the then British advice to maintain as much of the existing social/political structure in Iraq as was reasonably compatible with regime change. That they did ignore it remains, to me, astonishing.

If Iraq’s social/political structure isn’t “an artificial entity defined by inter-communal tension and spoils-system politics,” then I’m not sure what is. Stuttaford and the anti-EU right’s support for the war in Iraq—when they don’t even think that peaceful Belgium can get its act together—is the real farce here.