http://www.oilempire.us/biden.html Biden's false solution for Iraq: partition (good cop, bad cop)
http://www.oilempire.us/new-map.html The Empire's New Middle East Map
http://www.oilempire.us/dots.html Peak Oil Wars: Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, former Soviet Georgia, Africa and others.
The US empire is playing a "Good cop / bad cop" strategy where the neo-cons wrecked Iraq but the neo-liberals are in agreement that Iraq should bepartitioned (which would allow the US greater control over the oil). If the bulk of the remaining oil was in places that were predominantly Buddhist or Hindu, the US would be waging a war on Buddhism or Hinduism.
The national borders of the Middle East countries were mostly drawn by British and French imperialist bureaucrats around 1920, not by citizens of these nations. These lines separate the bulk of the Arab peoples from the bulk of the oil wealth, a quasi-Apartheid situation deeply resented by millions of poor Arabs. The Arab world is roughly divided into countries with large populations and little oil, and countries with little populations and large amounts of oil (an oversimplification, but the general point is valid). But these configurations still allow for nationalist control over tremendous oil resources - which the US empire still resents.
The neo-cons call the current Middle East conflict "World War IV," since they consider the many wars under the umbrella of the Cold War to have been World War III. If you add up the number of bodies in the wars between 1945 and 9/11, the casualties are comparable to World War II.
Some of the neo-cons have publicly proclaimed that their goal for the War on Iraq (and eventually, its neighbors) is to redraw the borders of the Middle East. The ostensible reason given for this arrogance is to separate feuding ethnic and religious groups from each other. However, if you combine maps of the "new Middle East" sought by these armchair warriors with maps of the oil fields, a more sinister motive becomes obvious. Dividing up Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia would allow the consolidation of most of the region's oil into a new country (which presumably would be allied to the United States). This would remove control over the oil from governments based in Baghdad, Tehran and Riyadh, allowing new arrangements of control to be established.
The supposed "failure" of the Bush Cheney invasion of Iraq allows for a new administration to supposedly fix the problems of their civil war by splitting Iraq into three new states - a Kurdish enclave in the north, a Shiite Arab state in the south, and a Sunni region in the center. Most of Iraq's oil would be concentrated in the Shiite region, with lesser amounts in the Kurdish part, and very little would remain for the Sunnis. This would allow the US to focus its occupation and manipulation on the parts of Iraq that have oil, and the parts without oil could be ignored.
Saudi Arabia has a similar confluence of ethnicity with petroleum geography. Saudi oil fields are in the east, along the Persian Gulf. The two holy cities of Mecca and Medina are in the west, along the Red Sea. Some neo-conservatives have floated the idea of partioning Saudi Arabia into at least two countries - one with the holy cities but without oil, the other without holy cities but with oil fields. The US merely wants to control the oil and is not interested in occupying Mecca and Medina.
Iran's oil is mostly in the western provinces along the Persian / Arabian Gulf. One particularly oil rich region is Khuzestan, an Arab area of Iran. Most "Westerners" probably think that Iran is an Arab country, but while it is Islamic, it is not Arab. Most Iranians speak Farsi, not Arabic. Iranians are Persians, not Arabs. Iran is a multi-ethnic country, but it is a strange circumstance that the area with the most Arabs is also one of the areas with lots of oil. In 1980, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein attacked Iran (with the covert help of the US), he was hoping to seize Khuzestan's oil fields to add them to his own oily empire (Khuzestan is on the border of southern Iraq).
The neo-con proposal for a new "Arab Shia State" along the northern Persian / Arabian Gulf would separate the bulk of the oil from Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Senator Joe Biden (D-DE), chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ran for President in 2007 largely on the platform of promoting Iraqi partition as a "solution" to the Iraqi disaster that Bush's invasion created. While Biden's presidential ambitions went nowhere, he is now Barack Obama's Vice Presidential running mate.
This seems to be a vicious example of the dialectic of creating a problem to force adoption of a solution.