Rael Jean Isaac

The Bush administration’s effort to bring liberal democracy to a unified Iraq is likely to fail, and for the same reason that its policy of fashioning a Palestinian state that will live peacefully beside Israel will certainly fail – the underlying conditions are against it.

What is worse, this should have been obvious all along. The administration is repeatedly blindsided by events that could easily have been foreseen. Thus Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice professed amazement at the victory of Hamas in the PA elections; no one in the State Department had prepared her for this possibility, she declared. Is it possible that no State Department policy wonk prepared a policy paper setting forth the likelihood of this outcome? Possessed of no special access to information, we predicted the Hamas victory in Outpost. After all, Hamas had recently swept local elections, and the expulsion of Jewish communities in Gaza, for which Hamas took credit, could only strengthen its electoral appeal.

Nor would the chances for fulfillment of Bush’s dream of a peaceful Palestinian state have been any better if Abbas and his coterie of brigands had won the elections. As AFSI’s pamphlet The Palestinians: A Political Masquerade pointed out in 1977 the Palestinians are an “anti-nation,” “one that derives its entire meaning and purpose from the desire to destroy another nation.”

In the case of Iraq, a book by two British political scientists, Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield, The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy or Division? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) sets out the underlying conditions there that the Bush administration has been ignoring at its peril. Since much of the book was apparently written in the months preceding the actual U.S. invasion of Iraq (the epilogue was written in November 2003, eight months after the body of the book was completed), it is not written in hindsight, but rather with foresight.

As Anderson and Stansfield see it, the underlying conditions of sectarian and ethnic conflict put the federal democracy the administration envisages out of reach and propel Iraq to either dictatorship or division. It is striking that what the authors describe as the most potent and threatening source of division is one that currently receives scarcely any attention: the determination of the Kurds (mostly Sunni Moslems but not Arabs) to achieve independence or failing that, a degree of autonomy little short of it. Compared to the rest of Iraq, Kurdistan has been a model of stability since the U.S. invasion. This is because the Kurds have achieved most of their goals: thanks to the “no-fly zone” the U.S. enforced over its territory after the first Gulf War, Kurdistan has become a de facto state with its own executive, parliament, judiciary, military force (the peshmerga), its own language and school system. A generation is growing up that does not even understand Arabic, the language of the rest of the country. The Kurds will not surrender these gains easily.

Kurds have been unwilling citizens of Iraq since the state’s inception. With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the 1920 Treaty of Sevres had envisaged a separate Kurdish state to include the Kurds of Turkey as well. But Ataturk had other ideas and in the end the English decided to add the northernmost Ottoman province of Mosul, with its large Kurdish population, to the provinces of Baghdad and Basra to fashion the state of Iraq. Periodic revolts by the bitterly disappointed Kurds were put down with ever greater brutality.

The Kurds came close to toppling the Baath regime in 1974 with the support of Iran, the United States and Israel (which began its support for the Kurds as early as 1962). But then in March 1975 Secretary of State Kissinger brokered the so-called Algiers Agreement between the then Shah of Iran and Saddam, which settled a long-standing dispute over the Shatt Al-Arab in Iran’s favor; in exchange, within two days of the signing, all aid to the Kurds was cut off. The upshot was that Saddam was able to crush the Kurdish uprising within two weeks. When Kurds again rose up during the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam depopulated rural Kurdistan, launched a chemical attack on the town of Halabjah that killed thousands, laid waste 4,000 villages, forcibly relocated and massacred hundreds of thousands.

U.S. policy makers now put forward federalism as the answer to preserving a unified state while granting the Kurds self-government. But Anderson and Stansfield observe that while it is possible to fashion a constitution with the most elaborate checks and balances, federalism is a sophisticated form of democracy, presupposing a willingness to compromise, acceptance of the rule of law, and a strong judiciary to arbitrate disputes. They write that “in the absence of any developed sense of national identity, a basic consensus over the legitimacy of the Iraqi state and a reservoir of mutual trust and understanding to draw upon, it is difficult indeed to locate the foundation on which a liberal democratic Iraqi state can be constructed.” As the authors see it, the issue of federalism, which Iraq’s Parliament must soon face, is a political disaster-in-the-making, for each group has a wholly different idea of what this should entail and what the Kurds demand is far in excess of what the others are prepared to tolerate.

And that’s just the Kurds. The authors point out that while the ethnic Kurdish/Arab divide centers on the basic legitimacy of Iraq as a state, the Shia/Sunni divide concerns the state’s identity. To Anderson and Stansfield, the relations of Iraqi Sunnis and Shias are a less intractable problem -- after all, both groups are Arabs and Iraqi nationalists. Here the problem is that Iraq, throughout its history, has been dominated by Sunnis, who are as loathe to relinquish their hegemony as the Kurds are to give up their quasi-independence. But absent parties cutting across denominational lines (which have done poorly in the Iraqi elections), democracy empowers the Shia, with their large demographic edge. Recognition of this (and fear of rule by Shiite fundamentalists) has been a major factor in stoking the insurgency.

The authors note that while the Shia religious leadership has traditionally avoided politics, to the extent it becomes politicized, the consensual unity even of Arab Iraq is threatened. Anderson and Stansfield completed their book in 2003, but what they worried about is coming to pass. The influential cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has stayed on the political sidelines, but Moqtada al-Sadr represents politicized Islam in its most dangerous form -- with his Mahdi militia to boot. What seems like the aimless terror of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, with its attacks on ordinary Shiites and their holy places, has been successful in what it seeks to accomplish -- deepening the sectarian divide and bringing to the fore bad actors like al-Sadr. Zarqawi’s hope is that in the ensuing anarchy an Islamist Sunni strongman will emerge triumphant.

While all that has happened could not have been predicted, being prepared for some of the problems required only a basic knowledge of the country’s makeup and recent history. But the Bush administration has not taken the underlying conditions seriously enough. There is a naïve faith in “elections” and “representing all parties in the governing coalition,” as if this would in itself ensure agreement on basic issues will be reached. The Bush administration talks of disbanding the sectarian militias (eleven in all, now estimated to be almost as large as the army), including those of the Kurds (good luck) or integrating them into Iraq’s security forces. But this would only deepen public distrust of these forces and make it more likely army and police would fall apart in the face of sectarian violence.

If the authors of The Future of Iraq are correct, the choice in Iraq is between a ruthless new dictatorship -- precisely the kind of government the Bush administration set out to eliminate from the Middle East -- or division of the country. And while Anderson and Stansfield clearly believe division is the better of available bad choices – and a guided division far better than one emerging from civil war – they do not minimize the difficulties. Even in the case of the Kurds, whose “entity” comes closest to liberal democratic norms, the minefields are plentiful. Where would the boundaries be, with oil-rich Kirkuk a major area of contention? There are serious divisions within the Kurdish community which could be played upon by neighbors, including Turkey, which is adamantly opposed to an independent Kurdistan. And if a Shiite state were created in the south, Iranian influence is likely to be strong, providing yet another reason (as if more were needed) to achieve regime change in Iran.

There is another problem with Bush’s vision for Iraq, which Anderson and Stansfield do not mention. This is that democracy requires adults, people who take responsibility for their actions. The Arabs do not even seem to fathom that there is a relation between actions and consequences, with elites as well as the famed “street” forever blaming others. Polls have showed that a majority think the destruction of the World Trade Center was engineered by Israel and the CIA to enable the U.S. to engage in war on Islam. Moqtada al-Sadr insists it is American troops who are trying to drag Iraqis into “sectarian wars.”

And while the Bush administration fashions policy under the assumption Middle Eastern jihadists are recruited because of the frustration of their desire to obtain a voice in how their own countries are run, Iraqi writer Nibras Kazimi points out that what today’s Middle East really thirsts for is an avenger: “they long for whoever will wash away the humiliation of having their principal cities, once seats of far flung empires, now roamed by infidel troops or their perceived lackeys.” The West, says Kazimi, faces “a dark spiritual effervescence that sputters out periodically from the Middle East in fits of mayhem stemming from a revenge fantasy that has been festering for 300 years.”

In this country, the choices currently presented may well turn out to be beside the point. To simply cut and run will leave chaos. But to adhere to the model of a unified Iraq that will be a model of democracy for the Middle East invites catastrophic failure. The real model that inspires emulation in the region is the Hamas victory. In its wake, across the Middle East, Islamists have become convinced that democratic elections will pave their way to power. One of the first countries to experience what analysts in the region call “the Hamas effect” is Jordan. Islamists there have vowed to push through a reform to fully legalize opposition parties (by gerrymandering and other methods Islamists have been kept to under 15% representation in Parliament), confident that like their “brothers in Palestine” they will win in free and fair elections. “All over the Arab world, the Islamists have the majority in the street,” confidently proclaims Jordanian member of Parliament Azzam al-Huneidi.

We do not question the good, even noble intentions of President Bush. But to fashion policy on the assumption that the Middle East is populated by oppressed masses yearning to breathe free is as out of touch with reality as the Israeli government’s policy, based on the premise that turning over territory “unilaterally” to enemies sworn to the state’s destruction will improve Israel’s security.

At the very least the Bush administration needs a Plan B, not just for Iraq but for the entire Middle East.