The next stage in the Administration’s carefully modulated plan for post-war peace: Balkanization. The Post has the story:

“BAGHDAD, March 28 — Sectarian violence has displaced more than 25,000 Iraqis since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine, a U.N.-affiliated agency said Tuesday, and shelters and tent cities are springing up across central and southern Iraq to house homeless Sunni and Shiite families.

“The flight is continuing, according to the International Organization for Migration, which works closely with the United Nations and other groups. The result has been a population exchange as Sunni and Shiite families flee mixed communities for the safety of areas where their own sects predominate.”

What an upbeat term: a population exchange. Everyone likes an even trade. But it’s a funny thing — wasn’t that sort of forced migration called ethnic cleansing in Serbia a few years back?

And yet, not a murmur from Washington, except the brain-dead “the parties must form a unity government” meme.

Which leads to one very interesting possibility — that the Administration has formally but covertly opted to close its eyes as the three main factions in Iraq violently reorder themselves into de facto sub-nations, each more or less religiously and ethnically distinct.

The Semi-Final Solution.

Yes, it has its hitches. In the natural course of things, some blood will be spilled, the rest of the world will wring its hands, and we’ll soon be unwelcome in most of the former Iraq.

But the beauty part is that we’ll always have Kurdistan. And our bases there will let us project force at will. And project we will, baby.

Mission accomplished, after all.