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While America's
attention was focused last week on the Republican
National Convention in New York, and the world was
watching the hostage tragedy unfold in the small
Russian town of Beslan, the prestigious British
Royal Institute of International Affairs (known as
Chatham House) issued a report saying a major civil
war that would destablize the entire Middle East
region is the mostly likely outcome for Iraq if
current conditions continue. Reuters reported Friday
that the report said the best outcome Iraq can hope
for is "to muddle through an 18-month political
transition that began when Washington formally
handed over sovereignty on June 28."
The Los Angeles Times reports that the fragmentation
of Iraq is the "default scenario" in the eyes of the
Chatham House team.
'Under this scenario,' the report says, 'Kurdish
separatism and Shia assertiveness work against a
smooth transition to elections, while the Sunni Arab
minority remains on the offensive and engaged in
resistance. Antipathy to the US presence grows, not
so much in a unified Iraqi nationalist backlash, but
rather in a fragmented manner that could presage
civil war if the US cuts and runs,' it says. 'Even
if the US forces try to hold out and prop up the
central authority,
The Chatham House report, called 'Iraq in
Transition: Vortex or Catalyst?' was released last
Wednesday. (Chatham House is often the scene of
regular international news events; British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw recently gave a major speech
there in August where he called for the overhaul of
the United Nations.) The organization's Middle East
team came up with three possible scenarios for Iraq,
two of which would create real problems for the US
and its allies:
If the Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd factions fail to
adhere to the Iraqi Interim Government (IIG), Iraq
could fragment or descend into civil war.
If the transitional government, backed up by a
supportive US presence, can assert control, Iraq may
well hold together.
A 'Regional Remake' could overtake the other two
scenarios if the dynamics unleashed by Shiite and
Kurdish assertiveness trigger repercussions in
neighboring states. Other Kurds would want their own
independence, and Shiites in other countries would
be more aggressive.
"The first scenario is the most likely," says the
report.
Shiite Arabs will not settle for a subservient
position, Kurds will not relinquish the gains in
internal self-government and policing during the
1990s and Sunnis will neither accept a Shiite-led
central government, nor a Kurdish autonomy in the
north. If the IIG or its successors fail to assert
itself as an organization capable of appealing
across Iraq’s societal cleavages, Iraq will
fragment.
In an article in the New York Review of Books,
former US ambassador to Croatia, UN official in East
Timor, and current senior diplomatic fellow at the
Center for Arms Control and Non- Proliferation Peter
Galbraith writes that "It is a measure of how far
America's once grand ambitions for Iraq have
diminished that security has become more important
than democracy for a mission intended not only to
transform Iraq but with it the entire Middle East."
Mr. Galbraith, who recently returned from his second
long trip to Iraq, agrees with the Chatham House
worst-case scenario and also says it is the most
likely outcome. He writes that Iraq's interim Prime
Minister Iyad Allawi is a troubling choice to create
the political stability that the US and its allies
so desperately need to keep Iraq from falling apart.
Allawi's colleagues speak of him with evident
affection, but even his allies point to his
shortcomings. Several of the INA's [Iraqi National
Accord, which Allawi founded] most respected leaders
left the organization because they objected to
Allawi's authoritarian style, including an
unwillingness to heed advice and inability to
delegate authority. As an anti-Saddam activist,
fellow exiles described Allawi as routinely
embellishing his credentials. He would claim to have
had meetings with world leaders that turned out to
be fictional, and has said that he controlled
operatives inside Iraq who, in fact, never existed.
But in an interview with the Nashville Tennessean on
Sunday, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the
US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the recent
'successful' resolution of the siege of Najaf is a
positive sign of things to come.
I think what we saw in Najaf was actually very good
from the viewpoint of Iraqis handling their problem.
The solution there was the prime minister and his
cabinet working with (Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini
al) Sistani, the cleric, and private leaders and
government leaders working in partnership with the
multinational forces coalition there and finding the
solutions — which they found and which hopefully
will last. Although the fellow (rebel Shiite cleric
Muqtada al) Sadr is not particularly reliable. He
changes his mind frequently, but for now Iraqis are
in charge.
An editorial in the Jerusalem Post last Thursday
argues that what happened in Najaf was actually the
"best that could be made of a bad job." It said if
the US and the interim government had rolled over
Moqtada al-Sadr and his forces, they would only have
reinforced in the minds of Iraqis the lesson that
they have been learning again and again since 1958:
"he who is capable of killing the most, wins a
political battle." But the intervention of Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani may have changed the equation
very much for the better.
Sistani's intervention, however, changed the nature
of the game. By deploying what could only be
described as "people's power," the grand ayatollah
succeeded in discrediting the tradition of political
violence established by the 1958 coup d'etat. He
showed that one can win a political battle without
having to kill large numbers of people. The whole
episode could be seen as a lesson to Iraqis that
politics need not be a win-lose, let alone a
zero-sum, game.
Finally, freelance writer Yusuf Al-Khabbaz, writing
in Media Monitor Networks, looks at the occupation
and rebuilding of Japan 60 years ago, and the
current day occupation and attempted rebuilding of
Iraq, and finds the two events have little in
common, despite what politicians may claim. (For
instance, he says, Japanese offered little or no
resistance to American soldiers, and "by most
accounts not a single one of the 150,000 American
soldiers in the occupying forces was attacked and
killed by Japanese citizens.") If Iraq is to be
rebuilt, Mr. Al Khabbaz says, the successful
rebuilding of Japan cannot serve as a model because
of significant differences in the two occupations.
http://www.csmonitor.com
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