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Considering 'soft partition' of Iraq
26.1.2007
By David Brooks
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January
26, 2007
Iraq is at the beginning of a civil war fought using
the tactics of genocide, and it has all the
conditions to get much worse. As a Newsweek
correspondent, Christian Caryl, wrote recently from
Baghdad, “What's clear is that we're far closer to
the beginning of this cycle of violence than to its
end.” As John Burns of The New York Times said on
PBS's “Charlie Rose” on Wednesday night, “Friends of
mine who are Iraqis — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd — all
foresee a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that
would absolutely dwarf what we're seeing now.”
Iraq already has the warlord structures that caused
mass murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and
elsewhere. Violent, stupid men who would be the
dregs of society under normal conditions rise amid
the trauma, chaos and stress and become revered
leaders.
They command squads of young men who leave the moral
universe and have no future in a peacetime world.
They kill for fun, faith and profit — because they
find it more rewarding to massacre and loot than to
farm or labor. They are manipulated by political
leaders with a savage zero-sum mind-set, who know
they must kill or be killed, and who are instituting
strategic ethnic cleansing campaigns to expand their
turf.
Worse, Iraq already has the psychological conditions
that have undergirded the great bloodbaths of recent
years. Iraqi minds, according to the most sensitive
reporting, have already been rewired by the
experiences of trauma and extreme stress.
Some people become hyperaggressive and turn into
perfect killers. Others endure a phased mental
shutdown that looks like severe depression. They
lose their memory and become passive and fatalistic.
They become perfect victims.
Amid the turmoil, the complexity of life falls away,
and things are reduced to stark polarities:
Sunni-Shiite or Shiite-Sunni, human-subhuman. Once
this mental descent has begun, it is possible to
kill without compunction.
In Rwanda, for example, the journalist Jean Hatzfeld
interviewed a Hutu man who had killed his Tutsi
neighbor. “At the fatal instant,” the man recalled,
“I did not see in him what he had been before. His
features were indeed similar to those of the person
I knew, but nothing firmly reminded me that I had
lived beside him for a long time.”
The weakness of the Bush surge plan is that it
relies on the Maliki government to somehow be above
this vortex. But there are no impartial institutions
in Iraq, ready to foster reconciliation. As ABC's
Jonathan Karl notes in The Weekly Standard, the
Shiite finance ministries now close banks that may
finance Sunni investments. The Saadrist health
ministries dismiss Sunni doctors. The sectarian
vortex is not fomented by extremists who are
appendages to society. The vortex is through and
through.
The Democratic approach, as articulated by Sen. Jim
Webb — simply get out of Iraq “in short order” — is
a howl of pain that takes no note of the long-term
political and humanitarian consequences. Does the
party that still talks piously about ending
bloodshed in Darfur really want to walk away from a
genocide the U.S. is partly responsible for? Are
U.S. troops going to be pulled back to secure bases
to watch passively while rivers of Iraqi blood lap
at their gates? How many decades will Americans be
fighting to quell the cycle of regional violence set
loose by a transnational Sunni-Shiite explosion?
I have become disillusioned with dreams of
transforming Iraqi society from the top down. But
it's not too late to steer the situation in a less
bad direction. Increased American forces can do good
— they are still, as David Ignatius says, the
biggest militia on the block — provided they are
directed toward realistic goals.
There is one option that does approach Iraqi reality
from the bottom up. That option recognizes that Iraq
is broken and that its people are fleeing their
homes to survive. It calls for a “soft partition” of
Iraq in order to bring political institutions into
accord with the social facts — a central government
to handle oil revenues and manage the currency,
etc., but a country divided into separate sectarian
areas to reduce contact and conflict. When the
various groups in Bosnia finally separated, it
became possible to negotiate a cold (if miserable)
peace.
Soft partition has been advocated in different ways
by Joe Biden and Les Gelb, by Michael O'Hanlon and
Edward Joseph, by Pauline Baker at the Fund for
Peace, and in a more extreme version, by Peter
Galbraith.
I'll give further publicity to their
recommendations.
theday com
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