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Iraq: Three from one doesn't add
up
By Nir Rosen
 Iraq is
"artificially and fatefully made whole from three
distinct ethnic and sectarian communities", says Leslie
Gelb in his November 25 New York Time article. Gelb - a
former editor and columnist for the Times and president
emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations - advocates
dismembering Iraq into three parts, a Kurdish north, a
Sunni center and a Shi'ite south, in what he calls the
"Three State Solution".
Gelb is no doubt
motivated by a sincere desire to extricate the United
States from the Iraq briar patch. He led the
anti-Vietnam War group during the Lyndon B Johnson and
Richard Nixon administrations. He commissioned the
Pentagon Papers that exposed the lie behind the Vietnam
War and extricated the US from a previous morass. Gelb
headed the State Department's Political Military Bureau
under former president Jimmy Carter. He was one of the
few people to understand the vanity of supporting the
Shah of Iran and ignoring Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
who led the Islamic Revolution in 1979. His warnings
went unheeded and US arrogance resulted in the hostage
crisis. Gelb is thus in a unique position today to only
increase the tangles in the Gordian knot tied by policy
makers who were clueless about Iraq.
Gelb
believes that chopping Iraq up would "allow America to
put most of its money and troops where they would do the
most good quickly - with the Kurds and Shi'ites". This
would force the "troublesome and domineering Sunnis,
without oil or revenues, to moderate their ambitions or
suffer the consequences". International law prohibits an
occupying power from altering the structure of the
occupied country, let alone dividing it up. This perhaps
is not a good argument because international law was
ignored throughout this conflict and continues to be
flouted as the occupying powers impose their economic
philosophies on Iraq.
Gelb views Sunnis as the
"bad guys" American foreign policy always seems to need
and seeks to punish them further until they behave, a
course of action sure to fulfill his prophecy and indeed
make all Sunnis the enemy. What "ambitions" is he
referring to? Shouldn't Sunnis be encouraged to
participate in the new Iraq? Shouldn't they feel it is
theirs as well? Most of the resistance in Iraq is
spontaneous and a reaction to the occupation, not part
of some Sunni conspiracy. Iraq's Shi'ites are as eager
to see American troops leave as the Sunnis are. Even
moderate Shi'ite clerics have recently called for an
immediate American withdrawal.
American troops
are not needed in Kurdistan, it is a peaceful region
policed by the Kurds themselves, benefiting from 10
years of autonomy, as Gelb himself admits. That's why
the American occupation is barely noticed there. While
the Kurds of Iraq are indeed a distinct ethnic group,
Iraq's Sunnis and Shi'ites are Arab Muslims. The vast
majority consider themselves Iraqis first, and only then
Sunnis or Shi'ites.
Iraq's Shi'ites have
consistently demonstrated their loyalty to the Iraqi
nation. Shi'ites constituted the overwhelming majority
of foot soldiers in the Iraqi army, even during the
eight year war with Iran, a Shi'ite state to whom both
Saddam Hussein and a Shi'ite-phobic American
establishment assumed Iraqi Shi'ites were actually
loyal. The Saudis recognized this in the Shi'ite
uprising that followed Operation Desert Storm in 1991,
and according to former American ambassador to Saudi
Arabia, Chas Freeman, the Saudi government asked for US
support of the Shi'ite rebels, seeing them as they saw
themselves, Iraqis first, Shi'ites second, and not pawns
of Iran.
Iraq is unique in the Muslim world as a
country where Sunnis and Shi'ites, both secular and
religious leaders, have often collaborated against
internal oppression and external aggression, and have
not engaged in the vicious sectarian bloodshed seen in
Pakistan, or the Wahhabi view of Shi'ites as heretics
and polytheists. Shi'ite ayatollahs supported Sunni
opposition movements, and a radical Shi'ite movement
like the Da'wa party had a Sunni membership of 10
percent.
Immediately following the fall of
Saddam's regime a remarkable movement of Sunni-Shi'ite
unity emerged with the participation of Iraq's alleged
extreme religious leaders, including the Shi'ite Muqtada
Sadr and the Sunni Sheikh Ahmed Kubaisi. When asked
about differences between them, Iraqis from Tikrit to
Najaf invariably say "there is no difference, we are all
Iraqis", or "we are all Muslims". Often they would add
that Americans are attempting to divide them by
stressing their differences.
Evidence of this is
seen in the American appointed Iraqi Governing Council
(IGC), whose members were all selected because of their
ethnic or religious identity. For the first time in
Iraqi history, the ethnic and religious divisions were
institutionalized. This was in fact the same error the
international community made in Bosnia, where it
enshrined the ethnic principle as the basis for the new
government.
It is wrong to speak of an
artificial "Sunni triangle". Iraqis do not divide their
country into religious regions like this. It is also
wrong to say that Sunnis dominated Iraq under Saddam.
More accurate would be to say that members of Saddam's
extended tribe, or of his hometown, dominated Iraq, to
the exclusion of everyone else. Many Sunnis in the so
called Sunni triangle resent the undue importance Saddam
gave to Tikritis, for example. Iraq's Sunnis and
Shi'ites are related by common history and often common
tribal relations, since Iraq only became a majority
Shi'ite state after Sunni tribes converted to Shi'itism
in the 18th century. Even the most extreme Iraqi
Shi'ites are Iraqi nationalists and view Iran with
suspicion. Iraqi Shi'ites believe their country is the
rightful leader of the Shi'ite world, since Shi'itism
began in Iraq, most sacred Shi'ite sites are in Iraq and
the Hawza, or the Shi'ite clerical academy of Najaf,
thought dominated by Shi'ites until recently. Iran is a
rival for them. Iraqi nationalism and unity were proven
when all members of the IGC unanimously rejected the
American proposal to introduce Turkish peacekeepers into
the country.
An Iraqi population already
skeptical of American motives would view any suggestion
of further division as proof of a nefarious scheme to
divide and plunder their country. Sunnis and Shi'ites
would all take up arms and the resistance would be
universal. There is no Sunni or Shi'ite Iraqi who wants
to divide his country. The Kurds of Iraq are of course a
separate ethnic group. However, they have participated
in united opposition movements before the war, the
reconstruction efforts after the war and are represented
in the IGC by both major Kurdish parties. Even the Iraqi
foreign minister is Kurdish. During Saddam's reign and
before, many Kurds actually cooperated with the regime,
serving as ministers and officers and even fighting the
rebel brethren.
Kurdish leaders from all
political parties have called for inclusion in the new
Iraq, and while many may dream of an eventual Kurdish
state, all recognize that it is quixotic at this
juncture. There is only a light American presence in
Kurdistan anyway, and it is not the reason troops are
meeting resistance elsewhere. A Kurdistan without US
troops is the greatest fear of most Kurds today who live
under the ominous shadow of their Turkish, Iranian, and
even Syrian neighbors. There is no clear border for
Kurdistan. Kurds covet Mosul and Kirkuk, where many
Arabs, Assyrians and Turkmen would violently oppose
secession.
Gelb's proposal is the singularly
least democratic suggestion offered to solve the Iraq
crisis to date. Moreover, no neighboring country would
accept the idea of dividing Iraq. How many small,
artificial and unviable countries (like Jordan and the
Gulf countries) does the West wish to create in
repetition of its post-Ottoman errors? Unlike
Yugoslavia, Iraq's different groups have no history of
separate existence and they have no history of mutual
slaughter. It is true that Iraq was to a certain extent
an invention. But all states begin as an imagined idea.
A state succeeds if its people believe in it. Iraqis
believe in Iraq. If anything, the American occupation is
only uniting Iraqis in resentment of the foreigners and
non-Muslims who rule them, and increasing their desire
to be "free, independent and democratic" as the graffiti
says on walls throughout the country. These are the
"ambitions" of the Sunnis that Gelb demonizes, just as
they are the ambitions of the Shi'ites and Kurds. Iraqis
believe in Baghdad, an extremely diverse capital city,
where Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds live together and even
intermarry.
Gelb, like all conscientious
observers, is seeking a just solution for the debacle
that poor planning (as well as poor justification)
caused in Iraq. The solution is to build a strong united
Iraq. This can be done by empowering the IGC, by
establishing a constitution that protects against
dictatorship and the domination of the country by one
group, by returning sovereignty to Iraqis as soon as
possible, and by avoiding the imposition of Washington
based ideologies that are disconnected from the reality
of Iraq.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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