Britain should not pull out of Iraq and
allow it to dissolve into real civil war, as Michael Ancram
has just suggested. We should instead help to break it up.
The continued failure to form a government in Iraq shows that
radical federalism is now the only long-term solution. Iraq's three
main groups - Sunnis, Shias and Kurds - will have to agree to
disagree and to lessen their claims on one another, acknowledging
that 85 years after the British first tried to create it, the
country still lacks the basis of a centralised European-style nation
state. The belief that Saddam's brutality was the glue that held
together the fragmented mosaic of Iraq has proved true.
As Gareth Stansfield argues in the latest issue of Prospect
magazine, Iraq is already splintering: Erbil in the Kurdish north
and Basra in the Shia south increasingly govern with little
reference to Baghdad and there are reports of extensive population
movements.
Decentralisation is most developed in the north, where the Kurdistan
regional government has recently concluded deals with DNO, a
Norwegian oil company, implying that the regional rather than
central government owns any new oil discoveries.
Last year's constitution is full of federal phrases, but there is no
real agreement between the centralists (the Sunnis and the more
nationalist, anti-Iranian Shias led by Moqtada al-Sadr) and the
federalists (the Kurds and the SCIRI-supporting Shias) on the things
that matter: oil, the role of the national parliament and the army.
Returning to a looser, federal country based on the three Ottoman
provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra does not mean partition -
there is still a role for a reduced central state - but it does need
very careful management. Stansfield argues that some of the alleged
problems with radical federalism, such as an Iranian takeover of the
south or a Turkish "veto", are not as serious as they seem.
Turkey is heavily involved in the Kurdish north, both politically
and economically, and could live with decentralisation. But there
are tricky regional border disputes in the north, and many of the
biggest cities, particularly Baghdad itself, have very mixed
populations. Large Sunni and Shia groups might end up as restive
minorities in powerful regions with governments hostile to their
interests.
Despite these potential problems, the status quo is not working. The
coalition could help to begin the process of disentanglement by
revising its own objections to decentralisation. Yet Jack Straw, on
his recent visit to Baghdad, refused to discuss with Kurdish
officials the distribution of power between regions and the centre,
and the British refuse to decentralise consular activities, such as
the granting of British visas.
The British did not create Iraq, as is sometimes claimed. But we
did, for our own imperial convenience, re-create it in the 1920s as
a centralised state dominated by a Sunni minority. The best way we
can now make amends is by coaxing the Sunnis and, more
realistically, Moqtada al-Sadr, to accept a return to the status quo
ante.
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