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Partitioning of Iraq has begun, from the
ground up
7.9.2007
By Charles Krauthammer
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September 7, 2007
WASHINGTON, -- It took political Washington a
good six months to catch up to the fact that
something significant was happening in Iraq's Anbar
province, where the former-insurgent Sunni tribes
switched sides and joined the fight against al-Qaida.
Not surprisingly, Washington has not yet caught up
to the next reality: Iraq is being partitioned -
and, like everything else in Iraq today, it is
happening from the ground up.
1. The Sunni provinces. The essence of our deal with
the Anbar tribes and those in Diyala, Salahuddin and
elsewhere is this: You end the insurgency and drive
out al-Qaida and we assist you in arming and
policing yourselves. We'd like you to have an
official relationship with the Maliki government,
but we're not waiting on Baghdad.
2. The Shiite south. This week the British pulled
out of Basra, retired to their air base and
essentially left the southern Shiites to their own
devices - meaning domination by the Shiite militias
now fighting each other for control. |
Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated writer in
Washington. Charles Krauthammer is a 1987 Pulitzer
Prize winner, 1984 National Magazine Award winner,
and a columnist for The Washington Post since 1985. |
3. The Kurdish north.
Kurdistan has been independent in all but name for a
decade and a half.
Baghdad and its immediate surroundings have not yet
been defined. It is predominantly Shiite, but with a
checkerboard of Sunni neighborhoods. The U.S. troop
surge is attempting to stabilize the city with,
again, local autonomy and policing.
This radically decentralized rule is partition in
embryo. It is by no means final. But the outlines
are there.
The critics at home, echoing the Shiite sectarians
in Baghdad, complain that an essential part of this
strategy - the "20 percent solution" that allows
former-insurgent Sunnis to organize and arm
themselves - is just setting Iraq up for a greater
civil war. But this assumes that a Shiite government
in Baghdad would march its army into the vast Anbar
province where there are no Shiites and no oil.
For what? It seems far more likely that a well-armed
and self-governing Anbar would create a balance of
power that would encourage hands-off relations with
the central government in Baghdad.
As partition proceeds, the central government will
necessarily be very weak. Its reach may not extend
far beyond Baghdad itself, becoming a kind of de
facto fourth region with a mixed Sunni-Shiite
population.
Nonetheless, we need some central government. The
Iraqi state may be a shell but it is a necessary one
because de jure partition into separate states would
invite military intervention by the neighbors -
Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
A weak, partitioned Iraq is not the best outcome. We
had hoped for much more. Our original objective was
a democratic and unified post-Saddam Iraq. But it
has turned out to be a bridge too far. We tried to
give the Iraqis a republic, but their leaders turned
out to be, tragically, too driven by sectarian
sentiment, by an absence of national identity and by
the habits of suspicion and maneuver cultivated
during decades in the underground of Saddam's
totalitarian state.
All this was exacerbated by post-invasion U.S.
strategic errors (most important, eschewing a heavy
footprint, not forcibly suppressing the early
looting, and letting Moqtada al-Sadr escape with his
life in August 2004) and by al-Qaida's barbarous
bombing campaign designed explicitly to kindle
sectarian strife.
Whatever the reasons, we now have to look for the
second-best outcome. A democratic unified Iraq might
someday emerge.
Perhaps today's ground-up reconciliation in the
provinces will translate into tomorrow's ground-up
national reconciliation.
Possible, but highly doubtful. What is far more
certain is what we are getting now: ground-up
partition.
Joe Biden, Peter Galbraith, Leslie Gelb and many
other thoughtful scholars and politicians have long
been calling for partition. The problem is how to
make it happen. Top-down partition by some new
constitutional arrangement ratified on parchment is
swell, but how does that get enforced any more than
the other constitutional dreams that were supposed
to have come about in Iraq?
What's happening today on the ground is not
geographical line-drawing, colonial style. We do not
have a Mr. Sykes and a Mr. Picot sitting down to a
map of Mesopotamia in a World War I carving
exercise. The lines today are being drawn
organically by self-identified communities and
tribes. Which makes the new arrangement more likely
to last.
This is not the best outcome, but it is far better
than the savage and dangerous dictatorship we
overthrew. And infinitely better than what will
follow if we give up in mid-surge and withdraw - and
allow the partitioning of Iraq to dissolve into
chaos.
Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated writer in
Washington.
Charles Krauthammer is a 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner,
1984 National Magazine Award winner, and a columnist
for The
Washington Post since 1985.
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