Max Boot, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, declared on MSNBC's The Cycle that the regime of the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) "should be utterly unacceptable to the civilized world."
Boot had been asked his opinion on partitioning Iraq, as some have advocated, including Vice President Joe Biden.
"Partitioning Iraq is not an answer for anything," Boot replied, saying that it would raise too many questions about who controls some cities, and that "under the current circumstances, if we're partitioning Iraq, what you're effectively doing is ceding the Sunni portions of the country, all of western and northern Iraq, to ISIS control. And you're ceding the Shiite portions in southern Iraq to Iranian control. That's not a good outcome."
Boot called himself ultimately "agnostic" about how many states should exist in the territory of Iraq, "But however many regimes there are in the territory of Iraq, we need to make sure that none of them is a sponsor of terrorism, none of them is a regime that commits genocide in the way that ISIS has been committing against the Yazidis and the Christians."
"It's not how many governments there are, but the nature of those regimes," Boot argued. "And right now the nature of the ISIS regime should be utterly unacceptable to the civilized world."