The Financial Times, 06 November 2006
In the run up to the Iraq war in 2003 the US’ Arab allies united in warning that regime change must preserve the country’s territorial integrity.
The only fear that loomed larger than the threat of Saddam Hussein was the disintegration of one of the Arab world’s most important states.
Three years on, as Iraq is torn by sectarian strife and the US looks for an exit strategy, some voices in Washington have started to ask whether the price of territorial integrity is worth paying.
The White House still maintains that partition is a “non-starter.” But some form of separation has now become a fashionable concept, prominent in the US debate over Iraq’s future.
Advocates say the Kurds have enjoyed autonomy in the north for more than a decade and Sunni and Shia militants have been slaughtering each other for months so they too might be might be better off going their separate ways.
Shifting American policy to favour such a solution to Iraq, the argument goes, would allow for some orderly outcome and facilitate a withdrawal of US forces.
Yet implementing any plan for separation has dangerous implications that extend beyond the borders of Iraq, provoking a much nastier and wider conflict over control of territory and oil resources.
While Kurds and some Shia Islamist parties indeed favour a loose federation, a survey conducted by the US’ International Republican Institute in June shows that a clear majority of Iraqis, including in the Shia community, are opposed to partition.
“That people are talking about it [partition] is an indication of how bad the situation is and a recognition at last that there is civil war raging,” says Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN envoy to Iraq. “But one must be extremely careful and people have to understand that the alternative to a united Iraq is not three independent entities, but chaos that will expand to all the region.”
Federalism has been one of the most divisive issues since the collapse of the Hussein regime. It was at the heart of the dispute over the constitution last year, with Sunni Arabs leaders opposed to Shia parties’ inclusion of a clause that allows for the formation of southern federal regions, worried it would eventually lead to the break-up of Iraq and deprive their oil-poor regions of income. Another objection was over oil distribution: the constitution says the central government should be allowed to control existing oil fields but is vague on who should control newly developed fields.
In the US, advocates of partition include Senator Joe Biden, the ranking democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Leslie Gelb, president Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. They first argued in a New York Times article in May that US policy should shift to establishing three autonomous regions, each responsible for their own domestic laws, administration and internal security.
The central government would control border defence, foreign affairs, and oil revenues. Baghdad, under the plan, would become a federal zone, with areas of mixed populations receiving multi-sectarian and international police protection.
But James Baker, the former US secretary of state who is leading a group set up by Congress to make recommendations on Iraq policy, has raised serious doubts about partition, pointing out that many Iraqi cities have mixed Shia and Sunni residents.
“How do you draw the boundaries?,” he told ABC Television last month. “And the minute you say we’re going to do that and make three autonomous regions, you’re likely to kick off a huge civil war.”
Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says one way is for the US to consider facilitating voluntary ethnic relocation within Iraq.
Some 100,000 Iraqis already are internally displaced, he notes, arguing that the Sunni could be persuaded to accept a form of partition if the central governing body distributed all Iraqi oil revenues equitably, on a per capita basis, rather than on geography.
In the Arab world, dividing Iraq - and taking it back to a three-province system that existed under the Ottoman empire -puts in question the whole structure of modern states in the region and sets a dangerous precedent.
“Many Arabs who will certainly interpret the (partition) proposal as an effort to fragment Iraq to Israel’s benefit,” recently wrote analyst Michael Young in Lebanon’s Daily Star.
“You will hear the familiar tropes that this is all part of a vast neo-conservative project to weaken the Arab world.”
In addition to facing stiff resistance from the Sunni of Iraq, Arab analysts say that a partition would upset the balance of power in the region and potentially spark multiple conflicts.
A separate Shia entity could encourage other Shia minorities to demand their own autonomy, and firmly put southern Iraq under Iranian influence. A Kurdish entity, meanwhile, could provoke intervention from Turkey, afraid of the impact on its own Kurdish minority. A Sunni region may well be controlled by extremist Islamists, inviting intervention from Sunni Arab states.
“Partition is a nightmare - you’d have a failed Sunni state, an al-Qaeda state,” says Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi security analyst and government adviser.
Anthony Cordesman, Middle East expert at Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says some form of partition may become inevitable but it would only be practical if it is the product of political compromise by Iraqis themselves, not an imposition from the outside. “One of the great problems is that this has to play out within Iraq,” he says.
But Mr Brahimi, the former UN envoy, says the unfortunate thing about the Iraq debate is that “no one is talking about Iraq anymore, but about how the British and the US will get out.” Iraqis, he adds, are divided enough as it is. “Foreigners should not make divisions worse than they are.”
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Citation: "US weighs price of Iraqi territorial integrity," The Financial Times, 06 November 2006.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e78b8b80-6dae-11db-8725-0000779e2340.html
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