Other People's Maps (Iraq, partition plans and the historical perspective) Wilson Quarterly

[pinto]

(Scholarly article looking at the historical precedents, some misconceptions and assumptions about federalism vs. sectarian division in Iraq. Interesting read when you have time. - pinto)

Other People's Maps
by Reidar Visser


Over the past year, increasing numbers of American commentators have suggested various “territorial” solutions designed to extricate U.S. forces from Iraq. These proposals have come in several guises, involving different degrees of decentralization and compartmentalization: “Soft partition,” “controlled devolution,” and ­“Dayton-­style détente” (a reference to the 1995 Bosnian settlement) are but a few of the concepts that have kept policymakers in Washington busy of late. All these proposals assign a role to foreign hands in drawing up internal federal or confederal border lines that would drastically reshape the administrative map of Iraq. At the very least, they foresee a role for the United States in “advising” the Iraqis on how to implement this process of demarcation, as, for instance, Senator Joseph Biden (D.-Del.) has advocated. And invariably, the authors of these proposals fix their sights on ethnicity as the guiding principle for the division of the country: Iraq is to consist of three separate subunits for what are seen as its “basic components”—Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiite ­Arabs.

The practical arguments against this sort of approach are ­legion—­and, by now, they are mostly familiar and well accepted, as seen in the confluence of opinion between the Bush administration and the Iraq Study Group on this issue. For millennia the lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris have been a meeting place for civilizations, ethnicities, and religions. Never before has any attempt been made to reshape the entire region by establishing ethnic and sectarian cantons; doing so now would involve extensive displacements of people in areas with mixed populations. Families in ­multi­ethnic cities would be torn apart as the intermixed Iraqis would be forced to choose sides, and communal violence would spread throughout the country as cities such as Basra, Nasiriyah, and Hilla saw more of the kinds of atrocities that currently occur in many parts of Baghdad.

The consequences at the regional level would likely be equally dire. Few believe that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran would sit still while their Iraqi neighbor became engulfed in comprehensive civil war, and an involvement of their standing armies would pose a far greater risk than the less-invasive meddling by proxies that marks the current situation. A regional conflagration—possibly involving the entire Persian Gulf and its oil resources—could come to provoke Shiite-Sunni tensions on a previously unimagined scale. The new borderlines so enthusiastically promoted by armchair strategists in the West could easily become flash points comparable to the Kashmir line of control fought over by India and Pakistan for decades. Today, Kashmir is routinely described as “the most dangerous spot on Earth.”

<big snip>

But the dangers of a partitionist approach to the Iraq conflict extend beyond Iraq itself. The real issue is not whether the lines drawn in the sand are historically sound or not. It is the very act of drawing such lines that is problematic. Even today, the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement—the World War I pact that sought to create Western zones of influence in the dying Ottoman ­Empire—­has few rivals as an object of universal hatred throughout the Middle East. Sykes-Picot is regularly held up as exhibit number one in Islamist and Arab nationalist criticism of the Western legacy in the Middle East, and it is no exaggeration to say that bitterness about such imperial ­line-­drawing has been a key factor in the rise of radicalism in the region. This rancor was one of the elements that produced the attacks of September 11 and other calamities, and people such as Osama bin Laden would no doubt be euphoric at the prospect of a ­modern-­day equivalent to Sykes-Picot, say, a Gelb-Biden Agreement. With these realities in mind, America’s new Iraq cartographers ought to ­re-­evaluate not only their novice works but their choice to draw lines on other people’s maps at ­all.

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=215618

Reidar Visser is a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and editor of the Iraq website historiae.org. His latest book is Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq (2006).

Reprinted from Winter 2007 Wilson Quarterly