Please note that I ask whether Iraq should partition herself, not whether the neoconservatives or any one else should do it for her. Let's remember whose decision it will ultimately be.
One of the problems the post-colonial world faced after the end of World War II was that newly independent nations simply inherited borders drawn up by their imperial masters. These borders were drawn with the needs of European colonialists in mind with little regard for local populations. Diverse and even mutually hostile populations were thrown together into states that were not really nations.
The borders of Iraq were drawn in 1920 by British imperialists. Iraq could easily be divided into three nations: a northeastern Kurdistan; a southern Shia state and a Sunni state centered in Baghdad.
Overthrowing Saddam had always tempted the US, but the reason American presidents were reluctant to do this was fear that any post-Saddam Iraq would disintegrate. Some weight is lent to this theory by events that have unfolded since the US invasion overthrew Saddam.
Saddam ruled Iraq at a time of shifting demographics. Saddam, although secular, was from a Sunni Arab clan and attempted to maintain the primacy of Sunni Arabs against Kurds, Turkmen and Shia. However, during this time, the Shia became Iraq's numerical majority, replacing Sunni Arabs. Saddam's style was that of an iron-fisted tyrant, a fact which further antagonized the minorities he oppressed. Mass murder of minority populations, such as against Kurds in 1988 and Shia in 1991, were not unheard of in Saddam's Iraq.
With Saddam's ouster, the energy of the repressed Shia was unleashed. The Shia, now over 60% of Iraq's population, would dominate any government based on popular elections. The question is whether the Shia can extend a hand to Iraq's minorities, especially the formally dominate Sunni Arabs, and govern as partners. Just as important are the perceptions of the Sunni Arabs themselves.
From the article which anchors this thread:
The war's wider pattern has always held the seeds of an all-out sectarian conflict, of the kind that largely destroyed Lebanon. The insurgency has been rooted in the Sunni Arab minority dispossessed by the toppling of Mr. Hussein, and most of its victims have been Shiites, the majority community who have been the main political beneficiaries of Mr. Hussein's demise. Shiites have died in countless hundreds at their mosques and their marketplaces, victims of insurgent ambushes and bombs, their deaths celebrated on Islamic Web sites by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, who has called Shiites "monkeys" and their religion an affront to God.
Zarqawi's war is with the Shia, not the Americans. Few Iraqis have any use for the neoconservative formula of an Iraq governed by a popularly-elected but impotent parliament with little choice but to dance to the tune of western transnational corporations that will control Iraq's economy. The one thing on which Shia and Sunni agree is that Americans should be gone.
Mr. Bush and his neoconservative aides, with a great deal of help from US corporate media, have framed the Iraq insurgency as a resistance to American occupation. If so, then the January elections were just as much an insurgency as the suicide bombings last week in Mussayib. As
Naomi Klein pointed out shortly after the elections, most Iraqis voted for a slate of candidates whose program flew in the face of US designs in Iraq; the Bush regime's favorite, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, headed a slate that garnered a mere 14% of the vote. While Bush and the neoconservatives continue to beat their chests about the January elections, the truth is that the result could only be read as a popular repudiation of US occupation.
The neoconservative desire to dominate Iraq's economy is doomed. Most Iraqis, regardless of ethnic background, want foreign troops out and the Iraqi economy in the hands of Iraqis for the benefit of Iraqis.
Americans are irrelevant to Iraq's civil war. Mr. Bush's troops could not prevent it and Mr. Bush's surrogate administrators will not be able to facilitate a resolution.
Obviously, Zarqawi's vision of an Iraq which continues to be dominated by a Sunni Arab minority maintained with Saddam-like violence is untenable. However, if Sunni Arabs are so fearful and resentful of living in an Iraq dominated by Shia that they see nothing better than follow or acquiesce to Zarqawi, then one may also ask how tenable is a multi-ethnic democratic Iraq.
Meanwhile, there is violence in the south against those not deemed sufficiently Islamic by Shia clerics and their followers. Earlier this year, Shia militias sympathetic to the cleric Moqtaba al-Sadr beat a group of young adults at a picnic at a park in Basra which they considered an affront to Islam,
killing two of them. The tensions in Basra run deep; the incident is simply the most serious manifestation of the struggle between secularists and Islamists in the south.
Moqtaba is someone to watch. Like Zarqawi, he has a vision of a united Iraq, although Moqtaba's vision is an Iraq ruled by Sharia law administered by Shia clerics. This vision, not surprisingly, has little appeal to Sunni Muslims or secularists. It has, however, a some appeal to the governing majority, headed by the conservative Shia Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari, which is writing Sharia into Iraq's new constitution and women's rights out of it. Democracy on the march? Hardly.
The question of whether Iraq's ethic divisions can be resolved under a single state and society is a valid one. It is something which the Bush regime (or any other foreign power) has no proper voice. Is partition into three separate states the best way for Iraq to go? Whichever way the Iraqis choose to go, how much blood will have to spilled to resolve the issue?
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