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Analysis: Can Iraq be split?
2.12.2006 |
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WASHINGTON,
December 1, -- Washington is abuzz with theories
offering a potential way out of Iraq, one risk
expert poses a new option: split Iraq in two.
"We need radical thinking. The military situation
(in Iraq) cries out for political experimentation,"
David Apgar, a risk and development strategist and
author of the book "Risk Intelligence."
The approach that Apgar advocates divides Iraq into
two separate states, with the border running from
northeast to southwest, dividing the two countries
just south of Baghdad.
"This partition proposal is not based purely on
ethnicity...The two states would share Iraq's Shiite
population between them, while one of the states
would also include just about all of Iraq's Sunnis
and Kurds," Apgar told United Press International.
The northern state would be composed of nearly equal
proportions of Sunnis and Kurds, with a minority
Shiite population living in and around Baghdad. The
southern Shiite state would include the major Shiite
holy sites as well as the southern oil fields.
"If you've got a state that's 40 percent Sunni and
40 percent Kurdish, roughly, and 20 percent Shiite,
that 20 percent group is going to be the group
that's almost always in power with one or the other
of the two larger groups," Apgar said, drawing a
comparison with the German centrist Free Democratic
party, which maintains its influence despite being a
minority.
The Shiites would "support Kurdish or Sunni
political parties depending on the attention that
those parties paid to the development needs of
Baghdad's urban poor," Apgar said.
"The needs of that 20 percent group (the Shiites in
northern Iraq) would rarely go unheard," he said.
Apgar's proposal relies on the theorizing of Ian
Bremmer, a political scientist and president of
Eurasia Group, in his recent book "The J Curve."
Bremmer's model, based on a composite of political
openness, political stability, and availability of
economic capital, suggests that closed states
stabilize by growing more closed and open states
stabilize by becoming more open.
Bremmer finds that plotting levels of political
openness and political stability on a simple x-y
axis creates a J-shaped curve. Countries that are
least open maintain, at least in the short-term,
high levels of stability.
As a state moves toward becoming more open to
influence from both within and beyond its borders,
the state must pass through the lowest dip of the J
curve when both openness and stability are
compromised. The state regains stability as an
electorate and institutions are established.
The border that Apgar proposes divides Iraq
according to its communities' apparent preference
for openness and tradition. Apgar explained that a
northern state comprising the Sunnis, Iraq's
administrative class, the Kurds, a cosmopolitan
diaspora, and the urban Shiites would favor more
open governance.
A southern Shiite state would likely favor
traditional governance, perhaps under Islamic law,
Apgar said. With a political solution, the military
could then oversee the transition.
Asked to comment on Apgar's proposal, Bremmer noted
similarities between Apgar's proposal and a plan
recently put forth by Sen. Joseph Biden (D, Del.)
and said that both options build off of divisions
that are already occurring in Iraq.
"Some variant of these proposals is already a
reality in Iraq," Bremmer told UPI. "The north is
moving toward a more Western-style democracy; that
certainly can't be said for the rest of the
country." Bremmer cautioned, though, that
"historical precedent suggests that political
experimentation could prove just as dangerous as
military experimentation for Iraq's future."
Senator Biden's plan suggests that Iraq be
divided into three semi-autonomous regions based
on ethnic lines but with a limited central
government in charge of common interests. Apgar's
two-state solution, however, troubleshoots some
primary weaknesses of the Biden plan, namely the
distribution of oil wealth and the trepidation of
neighboring states.
Unlike Biden, Apgar accounts for these major
considerations through the positioning of the
boundary, rather than as elements of a peace
agreement.
The partition between the north and south states
would not "be based on any difficult to enforce
promise about sharing oil or oil resources; each
state would rely on its own supply. (...) It does
not partition Baghdad itself. Metropolitan Baghdad
would lie entirely within one of the states, while
all of the major Shiite holy sites would lie within
the other," Apgar said.
Apgar also outlined the advantages that a two-state
solution in Iraq would bring to neighboring
countries. Most notably, this arrangement would
quell Turkey's concern about having a
semi-autonomous Kurdish region at its southern
border.
Under Apgar's proposal, Kurds in the northern Iraq
state would benefit from being equal in proportion
to the next largest ethnic group, but through the
combined Shiite and Sunni population, the northern
state would maintain an Arab majority.
The countries bordering a southern Iraq state,
namely Saudi Arabia and Iran, however, may have the
most to say (and do) about a potential two-state
solution. The Saudis have already promised to defend
Sunnis threatened by violence from Iran-backed
Shiite militias.
And it is difficult to predict how Shiite leaders
would relate to Kurdish and Sunni leaders in the
northern state, or how a Shiite government in the
south would regard its neighbors.
As a preface to describing his proposal, Apgar said,
"We seem to stick with one political conception in
Iraq for years, or certainly months, at a time. We
need the same kind of trial and error in our
political approach that we use in our military
approach."
"Let's start thinking about what Iraqis need," Apgar
said.
And perhaps we should, at least, begin to entertain
potential solutions that may at first seem radical.
UPI
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