Breaking up is hard to do

“…because if this fighting does not subside, the last American game plan for Iraq will be gone, and the only option left will be partition.”
--Strategic Forecasting, Inc., July 24, 2006

The American government’s intervention into Iraq has failed, and failed miserably. Much like an addict coming to terms with his addiction, if this most basic observation concerning the facts on the ground is not owned up to, we will never see our present, dire condition for what it is. We currently have the bulk of the United States Army sitting in the midst of a simmering cauldron of ancient hatreds that threaten to spill over, and this fact has placed the military in the unenviable position of attempting to build security networks and civil society while simultaneously fighting competing partisan forces inside the country. In sum, the current state of affairs is a recipe for disaster, putting US policy—not to mention US soldiers—in an unwinnable predicament. Simply put, new tools—perhaps even a whole new tool box—are needed.

I was among the early supporters of invasion. It is pointless now to debate the merits of that position, except in terms that might yield constructive ideas as to the situation we now face. From the beginning, I have felt that our post-occupation policy toward Iraq was far too circumscribed by the exigencies of world opinion. Aside from the notable presence of the United Kingdom and token forces supplied by Spain, Poland, and a few other countries, the international community has offered up little support for our position; therefore, the ownership of the current debacle is clearly ours and ours alone, and given the deteriorating condition of Iraq, there is now little reason to accept counsel from nominal allies and other interested parties. I am led to this position not out of hubris, but by acknowledging that the current problem is a product of our flawed approaches to date, that essentially, the problem is ours and the world has abandoned us to it. We would seem to profit little in expecting the world to share our misery in this regard. Misery may love company, but company doesn’t always reciprocate.

Given that, the policy we choose to put into place must have one set of objectives now: we must choose the best course for ourselves and the Iraqi people, to whom we are now duty-bound to provide an existence at least no worse than we found it. In this, sadly, we cannot expect help even from those we seek to help. Obviously, if civil society was viable in Iraq—if powerful Iraqis were not blinded by their bitterness toward one another—then much of our trouble in this regard would cease to exist. But it is not realistic to assume any sense of national commonweal on the part of Iraq’s leadership or her people; we must provide it ourselves. If this smacks of paternalism, of a self-regarding ‘white man’s burden’ approach to the parties involved, then we must do what we can to couch it in terms of sheer exasperation, rather than a haughty superiority. But we can no longer think of ourselves as merely being a political brokerage house or interlocutor for the involved parties in Iraq. In short, we will not pacify the country as it exists by putting in place a benign democratic order predicated upon basic freedoms. Any social fabric we attempt to weave of the disparate threads of Iraqi society will necessarily come apart despite our best intentions due to the powerful, historic forces at work. If a shared history of struggle and perseverance cannot produce concord among Iraq’s people, what makes Americans believe they can surmount the obstacles and impose civil society? It will not happen, and to persist in thinking otherwise is to piss into the wind.

If we have reached the point of a complete rethink on Iraq, what are our options? This month, Foreign Affairs magazine's website published a roundtable designed to kick the can around in search of a policy worth pursuing. Of the positions put forward, only one holds out the promise of averting a catastrophic civil war while providing a rationale and strategy that deals with things as they are, rather than how we would like them to be. This strategy was articulated by Chaim Kaufmann, a professor of International Relations at Lehigh University, and pursues a strategy of more or less decentralizing Iraq. I say ‘more or less’ because decentralization is a broad concept meaning different things to different people, and even Kaufmann’s vision of decentralization, I feel, doesn’t go far enough, for what is needed is not the euphemistic ‘decentralization,’ but the dreaded p word—partition.

While some might find that my support of the US invasion strains any credibility I might have on the course of future policy, I should say in my defense that I was much less sanguine regarding attempts to democratize Iraq, and remain so. As early as 2002, long before the invasion, I had advocated approaches to a post-Saddam Iraq that were quickly taken off the table by both the neoconservatives within the Pentagon as well as the doves at the State Department. I was willing to entertain in a serious fashion the dismantling of Iraq as a state, yet in the only policy conversations that mattered—those of men in power—such an idea was off the table even before much debate could be had. It was, in the language of diplomats, a non-starter.

Why? There is a strong inclination in policy circles—based mainly on the miserable experiences of the contracting European colonial powers of last century—against map-making, against partition. After all, as some people argue, are not today’s conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia the products of clumsy European attempts to draw national boundaries upon leaving their colonies? They will cite Israel and Palestine, Kashmir, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Somalia, and The Congo as examples of compounding a problem by neglecting any common sense in drawing the political boundaries that separate state from state. But I would argue that it was not any essential flaw in map-making, but rather an absolute lack of political will and interest on the part of the colonial masters that condemned these regions to generations of slaughter and discord. I should add here that, no matter what solution we strike upon, if we do not muster the requisite political will and financial/military resources, it matters little what we do; in effect, all political boundaries are more or less arbitrary, and only the application of power and money makes them stick.

Over and against the historical baggage we have inherited from Europe’s colonial enterprises, there were four powerful, geopolitical factors that proscribed serious discussion concerning dismantling Iraq from the beginning.

Most important of these was the historical position of the Turks vis-à-vis the Kurds. Any break-up of Iraq would almost certainly involve an independent Kurdistan being carved out of the northern third of Iraq. The Turks, our nominal allies who have long been embroiled in a civil conflict with its significant Kurdish population, are adamantly opposed to the creation of an independent Kurdistan, feeling such a state would serve as a source of inflamed Kurdish nationalism, fueling irredentist claims and thereby throwing southeast Turkey into a chaotic state for years to come.

The second major factor was the distaste policymakers had concerning the possible creation of an Iranian client state centered around the city of Basra in the largely Shia south. The whole point of breaking up Iraq is to separate Shia from Sunni, and this separation would necessarily add a Shia-majority state on Iran’s western border; critics reason that proximity and shared faith would compel the new state to tie itself closely to Shia Iran.

The third factor against a break-up involves the status of Baghdad. Much like Jerusalem, the city is divided among the two groups we would otherwise seek to separate. Awarding it to one group would create a permanent casus belli for the excluded group and create a potential humanitarian crisis due to communal violence.

The fourth factor is the practicality of applying partition to an oil-rich country. Iraq sits atop some of the most productive oil fields in the world, although they are distributed unevenly throughout the country. Also, the current Iraqi oil industry, particularly its network of pipelines, was laid down with the logic that there would be one Iraqi state, not four or five. This is compounded by the fact that Iraq has one viable port (Umm Qasr); in short, the development of post-colonial Iraq was predicated on there being one state, with each region developing over time an economic dependency upon its neighbors. Undoing this would not be easy.

In light of these four obstacles, one might well agree that the technocrats judged correctly in taking partition off the table early in the game; however, below, I will explore the underlying premises.

Playing chicken with Turkey
For many decades, the Turks have been a major American ally in the Near East, serving first as a bulwark against the Soviets during the Cold War, and more recently, as an example of a secular, relatively democratic Muslim state. We have been loud—and not particularly welcome—advocates for Turkish membership with the European Union; we have spent obscene amounts of money in propping up the Turkish government over the years; and American string-pulling via the International Monetary Fund in 2000 helped Turkey avert an economic catastrophe, allowing it to post impressive gains in recent years as well as gain control of its runaway rate of inflation. In short, we have cards to play in Turkey, and the time has come to lay them on the table. The Turks must join us in committing to a leap of faith in the creation of independent Kurdistan. If their worst fears are realized, then we must be equally prepared to allow the Turks leeway in solving the problem in their own way (which probably would mean Turkish control of northern Iraq).

Iranian Iraq
There is significant risk of any Shiite state created via partition to align itself with the Iranians, and further, there’s nothing much we can do about that. In fact, it would be best to go ahead and assume such an alignment. To mitigate the damage from such a state of affairs, we should do something that, on its face, might seem counter-intuitive; rather than create one Shiite enclave, create two. The first one should be roughly the size of neighboring Kuwait (that is, roughly a capital city and a little surrounding land); center it upon the city of Basra and extend it to the port city of Umm Qasr, roughly 20 miles away. The second Shiite enclave should take in the rest of the Shiite-majority area (see map).

Why two states instead of one? First, Basra’s history and culture is somewhat distinct from that of the hinterland. It is somewhat cosmopolitan, and if there is any chance of the West gaining a toehold in the Shia realm, Basra is it, especially so since an independent Basra would likely grow as affluent as the Emirates, and affluence has its moderating features. Originally founded as a military outpost by Caliph Umar in 636, Basra came to be a Shiite center of culture, learning, and commerce, but the Caliph was wise to place his outpost where he did. Basra is the military keystone to southern Iraq; it provides access to the sea, as well as control of the southern river valley. Separating Basra from the rest of Shia Iraq also makes sense in that, over time, the two states would likely see a divergence of self-interest, a split that would provide the West a lever in manipulating future events.

Baghdad, City of Migraines
Sorting out what to do with Baghdad would be a first-class headache. Simply put, there is no answer that most folks in the West would feel comfortable implementing, as any solution would require large-scale relocations of either Sunni or Shia. Further, simply drawing a line down the middle of the city would be a solution as ugly as Jerusalem’s or Cold-War Berlin’s. The city itself is composed of several dozen neighborhoods; some are almost wholly Sunni, others are almost wholly Shiite, and still others have significant minority populations, and to complicate matters, neighborhoods of the same sect are not necessarily contiguous. Sorting this out, I grant, will be a bear.

And of course, oil
Last, but certainly not least, is oil. As mentioned before, Iraq’s oil-industry infrastructure was developed within the context of Iraq being a single, unitary state. This alone offers advantages and disadvantages to each new state carved from it. It could provide a powerful incentive for cooperation, or it could spark unending warfare; there really is no telling (but of course, the current situation is already one of unending warfare).

The most geopolitically important consideration is how the oil fields get distributed among the four (or five, if Baghdad is considered alone) new independent states. Getting the weights and balances correct is open to endless speculation; however, suffice it to say that each group would, in fairness, require some control over oil. Personally, I would favor giving the Kurds Mosul and possibly Kirkuk; the Sunnis would get Baghdad as well as its ‘supergiant’ oil fields outside the city; the two Shia states would then split the Rumaylah fields and the remaining supergiants in the south.

Conclusion
What are the chances that such a partition could occur? At present, slim and none, for we are still kidding ourselves with thoughts of a unified Iraq. Additionally, this administration has shown little talent for diplomacy, tact, and cunning; the plan above would require boatloads of each, and frankly, I don’t think we have 500 days (until the next presidential election) to act on this. But most important, I don’t think the American people have the patience or the willingness to spend cold hard cash in pursuit of such a morally ambiguous and expensive plan. In any event, as I mentioned above, any plan will require sustained heavy investment of time and money, and are there not already members of both parties calling for withdrawal?

The idealists have had their go at Iraq; it is now time for the practical men to step forward and make such lemonade as we can from the bitter lemons we’ve been dealt, and the first step forward in this regard is to dispense with the fantasy of a unified Iraq willed into being on the cheap. We should begin the effort toward partition immediately.