President Bush’s insistence this week on benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet in terms of providing security is a pronouncement without practical consequence. There is not one part of the country where the government in Baghdad exercises any authority.
The Iraqi state has disintegrated. Kurdistan in the north is to all intents and purposes an independent state with its own elected government, its own army and its own flag. The Iraqi flag is banned and, by Kurdistan law, the Iraqi Army cannot enter Kurdistan. Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated south is not yet organised as its own state but it is governed separately from Baghdad by Shi’ite religious parties who enforce an Iranian-style Islamic law through Shi’ite militias that number in the tens of thousands. Baghdad is the front line of a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites and is divided between the Sunni west and the Shi’ite east. The predominantly Sunni centre of Iraq is a battleground between the insurgency and the US military.
Iraq’s voters ratified the country’s break-up in an October 2005 referendum when voters approved a constitution that is a road map to partition. The Iraqi constitution recognises Kurdistan as a self-governing region with its own army, substantial control over its oil, and where Kurdistan law is superior to Iraqi law on almost all matters. The constitution permits other parts of the country to set up their own regions and last week Iraq’s parliament approved a law that sets the stage for a Shi’ite region in southern Iraq with the same powers as Kurdistan. The constitution gives so few powers to Iraq’s central government in Baghdad that it does not even have the power to tax.
Iraq’s politicians do not behave as Iraqis but rather as agents of their sect or political party. Iraq’s previous Shi’ite interior minister used his position to convert a large part of the national police into an arm of his party’s militia, a change his successor — a non-party man appointed at US insistence — asserts he wants to reverse but has not.
Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American Shi’ite cleric, controls the transport and health ministries, placing his militia men in key positions, including airport security. Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, insists that all militias be disbanded, but protests vigorously against any coalition action against Shi’ite militiamen. This is not just because his governing coalition depends on parties with militias (as the Pentagon spinmeisters explain to unsuspecting journalists) but because he is himself a sectarian Shi’ite politician. Ironically, the only Baghdad-based politicians serious about national reconciliation are the troika of top Kurdish leaders — President Jalal Talabani; the deputy prime minister, Barham Salih; and the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari — and they are fully committed to retaining Kurdistan’s autonomy.
The Iraqi politicians behave as they do because this is what the voters of Iraq wanted. In the 2005 elections, Shi’ites voted overwhelmingly for Shi’ite religious parties, Sunnis for Sunni religious or nationalist parties and the Kurds for Kurdish nationalist parties. Fewer than 10% of Iraq’s Arabs voted for parties that crossed sectarian lines, while the Kurds voted 98.8% for full independence in an unofficial January 2005 referendum.
Where there is no nation, it is impossible to build an effective national police or army, as is evident from the coalition experience in Iraq. Iraq’s security forces are part of the problem in Iraq, and not the solution.
The Iraqi national police include the Shi’ite death squads that are responsible for the kidnapping, torture and execution of thousands of Sunnis in Baghdad and other mixed areas. In Sunni areas, the police either co-operate with the insurgents or are the insurgents. Iraq’s army is divided along sectarian and ethnic lines with most troops loyal to their ethnic and sectarian leaders, and not to a national command authority that is itself sectarian or based on ethnicity. The army is also ineffective. On a visit to Baghdad earlier this year, senior Ministry of Defence officials told me that a third of the army consists of ghost soldiers and only 10% will show up for combat, with almost none prepared to fight against irregular forces from their own group.
Iraq’s police and army are either Shi’ite or Sunni and therefore partisans in the civil war. Building up Iraq’s security forces is not a formula for ending the civil war; rather, it is a programme to make for more lethal combatants.
The Bush-Blair strategy in Iraq rests on two pillars: first, an effective national unity government that will make enough accommodations to bring most Sunni Arabs into the political process while isolating the die-hard insurgents and, second, building up effective and impartial Iraqi security forces that can take over from the coalition, or as President Bush puts it: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” It is obvious to almost everyone (except possibly the occupant of the White House who lives in a world apart) that both pillars have crumbled.
As US casualties mount and voters prepare to inflict retribution on the party responsible for the Iraq disaster, many in Washington are now focusing their hopes for a new strategy on recommendations from the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan congressionally mandated commission co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and retired Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton. They will be disappointed.
Baker has categorically ruled out partition of Iraq and, as a result, the study group has not given the idea any serious consideration. But, then, the study group is unlikely to come up with a road map to a unified and democratic Iraq. It is one thing to say that militias should be disbanded, that the constitution should be amended to guarantee the Sunnis a share of the oil, that Kurdistan should be reintegrated into Iraq, and that the security forces should be non-sectarian. It is quite different to explain how these things will be accomplished since, short of massive use of force, they can’t be done.
Baker has publicly warned the Iraqi government that it only has a few months to tackle Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic divisions, which is an indication that he is sufficiently out of touch with reality to believe that Iraq’s sectarian regime has the will and capability to act.
Britain’s foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, was more realistic last week when she opened the door to accepting Iraq’s partition: “If that is what they want and they feel it is workable that is another matter.” Clearly a substantial part of Iraq — including all its Kurds — do not want a unified country and this disunity is reflected in the constitution, elections and the conduct of its leaders.
Beckett also observed that Iraqis “have had enough of people from outside handing down arbitrary boundaries and arbitrary decisions”. While she did not say so, Iraq’s present misery derives directly from the decisions of her predecessors in the Colonial Office who drew Iraq’s arbitrary boundaries in a way that included the unwilling Kurds and then arbitrarily imposed a Sunni Arab king to rule over Iraq’s Shi’ite majority.
For 80 years, Sunni Arab dictators brutally kept the Kurds in and the Shi’ites down. When the coalition overthrew Saddam, it also destroyed the institutions that had kept Iraq together: the army, Ba’ath party, and the Sunni Arab-dominated bureaucracy. While the break-up of Iraq was certainly unintended, it was inevitable and it happened. The coalition should heed Beckett’s advice and not try to impose from the outside an undesired unity. To try to put Iraq together is a recipe for an endless coalition presence with no prospect for success.
Peter W Galbraith is a fellow of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington
