Reply #17: Kinda like the Indians are the oldest people here in North America...

[cascadiance]

Why don't they have a country of their own? Same difference! You can make a justification for balkanization in many instances, but past a certain point, you don't really help the situation. I'm not saying that the Kurds shouldn't have some degree of atonomy (kind of like we have with states here), but a separate country would probably cause more problems than it would solve. Then you also have the Turkomens, etc. that have significant numbers living within the Kurdish part of Iraq that are being arrested, etc. by Kurds trying to get a majority in places like Mosul to seize control of the oil there. Should the Turkomens also have their own country within this new Kurdish country? Then you can keep looking at more minorities, etc. until you get to families, and then you have folks like Hatfields and McCoy's wanting their own countries. It really isn't something that's that simple. It's a quite complex situation.