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A similar argument for letting Iraq divide along its
natural fault lines has been made by Sen. Joseph R.
Biden Jr., the leading Democratic Party voice on
foreign policy, and Leslie Gelb, a former president
of the Council on Foreign Relations. And it has
become an urgent question for the Bush
administration as the situation on the ground in
Iraq continues to deteriorate. By Galbraith's
account, "staying the course" in Iraq won't just
waste American lives and money; it will prevent
Iraqis from reaching their own form of stability
once the American enterprise collapses, as it
inevitably will. "Looking at Iraq's dismal
eighty-year history," he writes, "it should be
apparent that it is the effort to hold Iraq together
that has been destabilizing. Pursuit of a coerced
unity has led to endless violence, repression,
dictatorship, and genocide."
If partition were an easy process of tearing along
neatly perforated lines, it would be hard to argue
with the Galbraith-Biden-Gelb proposition. But the
reality is that the old Iraq was a genuinely
heterogeneous society, with Sunnis and Shiites
sharing neighborhoods, inter-marrying, even being
members of the same tribes. Saddam Hussein's regime
was built on the idea of "Arabism," a shared
identity that transcended religious and ethnic fault
lines -- by force, if necessary. Still, this
ideology was remarkably successful. It's common now
for analysts like Galbraith -- who amassed a grim
expertise on ethnic bloodshed as the first U.S.
ambassador to Croatia -- to say that this Iraqi Arab
identity was fused at the point of a gun, but that
misses the yearning for modernism and secular
society that animated the educated middle class in
the old Iraq. The only group that always remained
outside this national consensus, in my experience,
was the Kurds.
The de facto partition of Iraq has already begun,
and we can see what a brutal process it is --
especially around Baghdad, the epicenter of
sectarian violence. Sunni neighborhoods are being
cleansed of Shiites and vice versa; death squads
roam the streets and throw up checkpoints; the
squads kidnap, torture and kill those from the
"other" sect. Looking at Iraq's ravaged capital,
whose security situation even President Bush called
"terrible" in late July, it's hard to imagine that
things could get worse. But they almost certainly
would the moment it became clear that the United
States had given up on a unified Iraq. That would
unleash a violent separation of populations and
wholesale killing until Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish
militias established what they considered defensible
boundaries. In this initial separation, tens of
thousands could be killed. (The Indian subcontinent
still shudders from the trauma of the India-Pakistan
partition almost 60 years ago.) Once stable ethnic
cantons were established, the killing would diminish
but not stop. In Lebanon, the separation phase was
followed by 16 years of civil war that included
sniping and artillery duels across the "green lines"
that separated the cantons.
If things are as bad as Galbraith argues, it's
possible that poor, ragged Lebanon may be Iraq's
best model. Through all the years of its miserable
1975-90 civil war, Lebanon retained a president, a
prime minister, a parliament, a national army. These
governing institutions didn't do much; real power
had devolved to the militias and to the regional
powers -- Israel and Syria -- that had occupied
Lebanon. But the idea of a Lebanese nation survived,
as has been evident in the way its population has
rallied around its tattered flag during recent
weeks.
A partitioned Iraq, too, would risk being carved up
by the regional powers, with Iran enfolding the
Shiites in its wings, Turkey setting brutal red
lines for the Kurds lest they try to wrest away a
chunk of its own turf, and the Syrians and
Jordanians sharing the thankless task of trying to
maintain order among the Sunnis. Not an appealing
prospect.
Despite its troubling prescription, Galbraith's book
is important because, as much as any American, he
has lived the Iraq tragedy up close and personal.
From the beginning, he focused his attention on the
plight of the Kurds, becoming a kind of adviser and
emissary of the Kurdish leader (and now Iraqi
president) Jalal Talabani. This ardent
identification with the Kurdish cause has simplified
Galbraith's choices in analyzing the Iraq conundrum:
It's clearly good for the Kurds to achieve their
historic dream of an independent homeland, but
whether this separation is better for other Iraqis
-- and for the interests of the United States and
its allies -- is a much harder question.
Galbraith's fascination with Iraq began in 1984,
when he traveled to Baghdad as a staff member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had the
gumption to press then-Deputy Prime Minister Tariq
Aziz about whether Iraq was using poison gas in its
war against Iran, and he has been asking good,
contrarian questions ever since.
Galbraith's passion for the Kurds dates back to
1987, when he traveled to Sulaymaniyah and stumbled
upon what he later realized was a genocidal
Iraqi campaign, code-named the Anfal, that was meant
to break Kurdish political and cultural life. He
returned again and again, becoming close to Talabani,
Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and other key
figures in the story.
Galbraith sketches some reasons for the American
failure in Iraq, such as inadequate planning for
postwar Iraq, lack of understanding of the players
and their interests, and ongoing policy squabbles in
Washington. But such familiar assessments are not
the real contribution of his short book,
part-memoir, part-policy treatise. Other books,
published and on the way, are doing that big
analytical task better. The value of Galbraith's
account is that it's rooted in his personal
experience -- why he loathed Saddam Hussein's
regime, why he came to champion the Kurdish cause,
how he watched as America turned a war of liberation
into a bungled occupation.
I wished for a little more self-criticism -- an
appreciation that the Kurds, for all their tragic
history, have been part of the problem in
post-liberation Iraq, too, by pushing their own
agenda for greater self-rule so hard. And I found a
bit too easy Galbraith's transition from enthusiast
for toppling the old Baathist tyranny to critic of
the postwar occupation. The people who got it wrong
sometimes seem to include everyone but Galbraith.
But those criticisms don't alter my admiration for
the book or its author.
So what of the fundamental question he raises? Is
the Iraq venture doomed? Are we wasting American and
Iraqi lives pursuing a vision of a new, unitary Iraq
that has no connection with reality? Should we
conclude, as Galbraith does, that Iraq itself is
finished? We're all shaped by our personal
experiences and contacts in weighing questions like
this. When I put the matter to some of the Iraqis I
have met in the 26 years since I first visited that
country, they warned that, bad as things are now,
they would be even worse if America pulled out
suddenly. In the end, accepting partition may amount
to accepting reality -- but that's a measure of just
how bad things have gotten in Iraq. We made the
mistake of rushing into Iraq without thinking
carefully enough about the consequences of our
actions. We should not make the same mistake in
rushing out.
Extracted from The End of Iraq by Peter W Galbraith,
published by Simon & Schuster.
Peter Galbraith is a former US ambassador with a
long involvement in policy on Iraq
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