councilor.org
| Source | Ken Hanly |
| Date | 06/11/05/21:52 |
| Three into one proves an odd fit
November 4, 2006 Sydney Morning Herald www.smh.com.au The suggestion that Iraq should be carved into three holds as much danger as it does possible solutions, writes Paul McGeough. CARTOGRAPHY IS SUCH jolly good fun. Take this river, slash a pencil across the map till it hits those mountains and we'll give it a flag and call it a country. Stop! Go back - the oil fields are meant to be on "our" side of the line. That's pretty well how it was done in the early 1900s. Fabled names from the British Colonial Office stomped the marshes of Mesopotamia - Percy Cox, Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence. Especially colourful was the pipe-smoking St John Philby, the father of the English spy Kim, who careered around the deserts on a motorcycle, drawing borders as he went. That's how we got Iraq. They threw together three loosely affiliated provinces of the collapsed Ottoman Empire - Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. But they had no regard for the lack of national or even communal interest between the three provinces. Fast forward to 2003. The Americans, like the British before them, refused to go to their libraries and archives, where shelves groan with sociological and political studies dating from the 13th century, warning that the geographic putty they wanted to mould as the new Iraq was treacherous stuff for would-be colonisers. Down the centuries, the regional landscape has changed dramatically - politically, commercially, militarily. But the missing ingredient has always been any real sense of nation. To the extent that the people we call Iraqis were bound at all, the cohesive forces have been the tribe, the clan and - more recently - the mosque. Attempts to centralise power were met with contempt and, inevitably, they failed. Ironically, the most successful was that by the ousted dictator Saddam Hussein. But even he could manipulate the tribes and clans for only so long and only with the brute force for which he is likely to be sentenced to death tomorrow. The high point for Saddam was 1991, when tribal chiefs assembled at his presidential palace in Baghdad. They laid at his feet banners that represented their mini-statehood and they removed their headdress as a tribal sign of deference and allegiance. This was not about love and respect for Saddam, so much as the dictator's ability to strike the right price - in money and jobs, power and influence - as he played the tribes against each other. Saddam even took to calling his Baath party the "tribe of tribes". But by 2003 the sheiks had had a gutful, so they stepped back as their "chief of chieftains" was taken down by an American-led strike. Amid the excitement of a successful military invasion, acknowledging the tribes was too much like anti-democratic mumbo-jumbo for the predominantly Republican evangelicals who swarmed into Baghdad on a mission to rebuild Iraq as a model of democracy. But the tribes' renewed sense of entitlement was a time bomb left for the Americans by Saddam. Today it is exploding, and as Iraq falls apart we are witnessing the birth of at least three new nations - already we know the mountains of the north as Kurdistan; the resource-rich, southern triangle likely will become Shiiastan; and a barren, central belt could become Sunnistan. Now that "stay the course" is starting to mean "cut and run" in US rhetoric, advocates of breaking up the country are getting traction in the Iraq discourse in Washington. Britain is falling into line and Australia doesn't matter. American leverage - diplomatic, economic and military - is just about exhausted and, despite all their vital interests, none of the neighbours will help - except to stir the pot. There are many recipes for attempting to unscramble the Iraqi eggs. "Hard" partition, "soft" federalism, "loose" confederation and, try this one, "Quebec-like asymmetrical decentralisation". But all entail stepping down the road towards dismantling what the British built in the years after World War I. Incredibly, against the backdrop of so much suffering in liberated Iraq, some US analysts still believe they have the luxury of choosing between the break-up of Iraq and a full-blooded civil war, seemingly forgetting that one is usually born of the other and - invariably - at huge and painful cost to the local population. A few cheerfully fall back on the Vietnam-era policy of bombing villages to save them. In an essay circulating on the internet, Major Isaiah Wilson III, a former military planner in Iraq who now lectures at West Point, brims with enthusiasm as he answers his own question. "Should we give civil war a chance …? For Iraq, as ironic and illogical as it may seem, a true and sustainable future may come in the aftermath of the very sectarian-based civil war we have been striving to prevent." The partition massacres in India-Pakistan and, more recently, in the Balkans are either forgotten or factored in as just another price to be paid, with numbing suggestions such as retired US Colonel T.X. Hammes's offering to The Washington Post: "We will have to develop and fund some kind of displacement agency to move the families …" The Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon also masks the inevitable further suffering by Iraqis in chillingly abstract terms: "… the international community and the Iraqi Government could help offer housing and jobs to those wishing to move as well as protection en route. Houses left behind would revert to government ownership, to be offered to individuals of other ethnic groups who wanted them, in what would largely become a program of swapping". How might the new new Iraq look? The noise you hear is the back door slamming as the Kurds quit Iraq. Since 1991 they have had virtual autonomy and they have managed to preserve and strengthen it in the new Iraqi constitution. They have a booming economy. They have their own language and now have adopted English over Arabic as the second language to be taught in their schools. They have their own military and their own laws; they refuse to fly the Iraqi flag and staff of the Baghdad ministries and the Iraqi military are barred from entering Kurdistan. Shiites are now demanding that they be allowed to have in the south what the Kurds have in the north. The Shiite factions have taken to shooting at each other in recent weeks but while their divisions are voiced as support or opposition to partition, they are read by some analysts more as tests of numerical strength and a contest for control of oil and funds. The imposition of strict Islamic codes across the south suggests the government of Shiiastan would be a version of the neighbouring Iranian theocracy. That would be deeply disappointing for Washington. The main Sunni players in Iraq are fighting any break-up, principally because Iraq's vast oil wealth lies beneath the Kurdish strongholds in the north (40 per cent) and the Shiite strongholds of the south (60 per cent). But al-Qaeda had already declared a Sunni Islamic emirate through central Iraq. And if the Kurds and the Shiites go their own way, it would amount to a lock-out - the Sunnis would have been forced into a sad and sullen state, sandwiched between their runaway neighbours to the north and south. Secular and Islamist factions could well end up fighting for control of Sunnistan; a contest that Rend al-Rahim, an Iraqi community leader in the US, predicts would make it a radical, Taliban-style regime and a potential breeding ground for regional, if not global, terrorism. This would be bitterly disappointing for Washington. In Baghdad recently, the Herald asked one of the architects of the new Shiiastan about the Sunni fears of abandonment and impoverishment in their new statelet. He replied dismissively: "So what?" War has neutered Baghdad as a central authority, the Iraqi Parliament has legislated for the first steps towards dismemberment of the country and the new Iraqi constitution that Washington hailed as a victory for democracy also happens to be a break-up blueprint. The constitution reduces Baghdad to a shell of a capital - it might end up with control of foreign affairs and some fiscal powers, but tax-raising, much security and at least all new resources royalties would go to the new regional capitals. There is hardly a national bone among the new Iraqi leadership - instead of running the country for all Iraqis, they fight for sect and ethnic control of ministries which many of them then rob blind. The security forces are the same - they too have splintered into ethnic and religious fiefdoms with little regard for the national good. The dissolutionists gloss over the intense intermixing of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq's biggest cities - arguing that Baghdad could be a Canberra- or Washington-style capital state, or that the population in Baghdad and Mosul could be shunted to whichever bank of the Tigris River they already dominate. The United Nations estimates that since the US-led invasion, 1.6 million Iraqis have fled the country and another 1.5 million have been internally displaced. In other conflicts we gave this process a name - ethnic cleansing. The oil-rich, north-eastern city of Kirkuk is an explosive element of the new equation: the Kurds want it; the Shiites and Sunnis insist they can't have it. The Kurds argue it is Kurdish, but local Arabs, many of whom were trucked in as part of Saddam's program of Arabisation, and a sizeable Turkoman population, disagree. No one seems to have given any thought to the fate of Iraq's significant Christian population. The likeliest aftermath of partition would be continuing war. The Americans would be safer in bases in the new Kurdistan and Shiiastan which also would be able to enlist their respective militias as security forces to man their borders. Territorial disputes would leave stretchmarks the length of all the new borders and Sunnistan, inevitably, would be home to terrorist elements and to Sunni nationalists refusing to concede the loss of what was their share of Iraq's natural resources - oil, in particular. That means a lot more war. If the Sunnis were starved of foreign reconstruction aid, they would soon fall into line, some of the dissolutionists claim. "Let them rot," argues a retired US Army officer, Ralph Peters. The regional consequences are dire, too. Do the Shiite theocrats in Tehran put Shiiastan in their pocket? Will the Shiites of adjoining north-eastern Saudi Arabia, whose territory holds much of the kingdom's oil wealth, want to join in? How much Kurdish autonomy would Turkey tolerate? How much Sunni dispossession could Saudi Arabia and Jordan stand? And whatever the Americans do in Iraq now, they can hardly move without being accused by at least one of the three main factions of siding with one of the other two. One of the darkest warnings from analysts on the hopelessness of Washington's position is their underscoring of a deep lack of trust in the new Iraq. No matter how watertight any deal on power- or resource-sharing might seem, there are scores to be settled so there is no reason for the Sunnis to trust either the Shiites or the Kurds in the long term. Another of their warnings is not to think just of three regions. Some analysts predict volatility and fragmentation within each of the three regions - there are two Kurdish factions and numerous Shiite and Sunni factions that are capable of turning on each other as they jockey for supremacy in the respective regions. SO AS civil war and disintegration continue apace, what might we learn from the history of conflicts around the globe? Stanford University's Professor James Fearon had sobering news for a US congressional committee in September. He told them the average duration of post-World War II civil wars around the globe is more than 10 years; the chances of a successful power-sharing agreement ending such conflicts are less than one in six; the presence of foreign forces merely delays the inevitable - whether they stayed for one or five more years, the likely scenario on the departure of US forces is a Lebanon-like civil war. Those archives of advice that were ignored by Washington also hold the ruminations of John Glubb, a 1920s British colonial officer who, in his diaries, railed against the US and the British establishment and media. He wrote: "[They] continue to demand that the nations of Asia and Africa should make a clean cut with their past and, at one fell stroke, adopt the mentality and traditions of the Western democracies … Would it not be more practical, as well as more polite, if we left these nations to govern themselves in their own way?" Then, Glubb was seen as a captive of the romance of the desert tribes. In these politically correct times, some will dismiss his suggestion that the desert is no place for democracy as racist. But as the Americans try to backtrack out of a hell of their own making and Iraq disintegrates into something like it was 80-plus years ago, it seems that despite his romance and racism, Glubb actually wrote what his successors might belatedly call an "exit strategy". |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho