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No less an authority on the
breakup of failed states than Peter Galbraith, the
former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, considers the
possibility that Iraq will split up along ethnic and
religious lines "more likely than a transition to a
centralized democracy."
Religious and ethnic violence has been a fact of
life in Mesopotamia for thousands of years; it has
been suggested before that only a monster like
Saddam Hussein could have hoped to rule it as one
country.
(Mr. Galbraith, by the way, will speak Friday,7 :
30p.m., to the Windham World Affairs Council of
Vermont in the Rotch Center located on the World
Learning campus here in Brattleboro; his talk is
entitled, "How to Get Out of Iraq.")
The United States, he writes in the New York Review
of Books, "faces a near-impossible dilemma in Iraq."
If it withdraws now, it will leave a weak central
government incapable of controlling the chaos that
provides such fertile ground for terrorists. But by
staying, it undermines the legitimacy of that
government.
A civil war may come whether American troops
withdraw or not. The horrific torture-murder of five
Shiite truck drivers in Fallujah this past June may
prove the flash point for a confrontation between
Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority and the Sunni
minority. The descriptions of the pictures of their
mutilated bodies make the snapshots from Abu Ghraib
pale by comparison. They are making the rounds of
Shiite mosques in southern Iraq, and so great is the
anger in the Shia heartland that the American troops
now besieging Fallujah may be the only thing that
prevents the Mahdi Army from sacking it.
Meanwhile, the Kurds in the north, who already had a
quasi-independent state under American protection,
are disenchanted with the blunders of the occupation
and annoyed that their leaders were frozen out of
top spots in the new government. Their militia is
the second most numerous, best trained and equipped
fighting force in Iraq, and they are openly talking
of secession and of refusing to let the new Iraqi
army enter their territory. In the south, Shiite
political parties and religious institutions form a
defacto government, independent of Baghdad’s
authority.
President Bush, before the invasion, promised to
respect the territorial integrity of Iraq, which was
formed by the British from the Ottoman provinces of
Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. Religious and ethnic
violence has been a fact of life in Mesopotamia for
thousands of years; it has been suggested before
that only a monster like Saddam Hussein could have
hoped to rule it as one country. Civil war would be
intolerable -- it would benefit the terrorists, it
would threaten the already precarious stability of
world oil markets, and it would put American troops
in an even more untenable position.
The Turks kept those provinces separate for a
reason. A "loose federation," Mr. Galbraith
suggests, would allow the people of Iraq to rule
themselves, and take America off the hook. Perhaps a
unified Iraq is a promise Mr. Bush, or Mr. Kerry
should consider breaking.
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