Anderson and Stansfield believe that a long US occupation has a better chance of resulting in democracy, and a short occupation is more likely to produce authoritarianism or ethnic conflict. They are deeply skeptical that the US public will put up with a long occupation that would involve a constant stream of body bags coming back to the States. The best hope for both a reasonably quick US exit and a viable democracy, they believe, lies in a partition of the country, either into an independent Kurdistan and an Arab "Mesopotamia," or into three states, along the Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab ethnic lines. Iraq, they argue, is an artificial nation, and the three states would reflect a more "natural" division of the territory.
-
Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!
Juan Cole: Paranoia over the Pashtuns along the Afghan border isn't unique to Washington, just to empire. The British had a case of it 100 years ago.
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Obama's Mideast Reset
Juan Cole: In the wake of a charismatic speech, it's clear that a substantial majority of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims are rooting for him.
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Iraq: The Necessary Withdrawal
Juan Cole: The removal of US troops must be prompt, complete and coupled with smart diplomacy.
Unfortunately, Anderson and Stansfield do not survey the full range of implications of their proposal. No major indigenous Iraqi political party or actor favors partition. Even the Kurds want a loose federalism. Turkey has threatened to go to war to prevent the emergence of an oil-rich independent Kurdistan, which its leaders fear might entice the Turkish Kurds of eastern Anatolia into a separatism that would fragment Turkey. The Iranians less truculently maintain a similar view, because of sensitivities about their own Kurdish minority.
It is not even clear that an independent Kurdistan in the rugged north is economically viable, assuming that the rest of Iraq does not quietly yield to them Kirkuk's petroleum wellheads or, indeed, the city of Kirkuk itself, which does not have a Kurdish majority. Those wellheads are, in any case, old and being depleted, and the future of Iraqi petroleum lies in the south. An independent Kurdistan could well be doomed as a poor, landlocked country with declining oil revenues.
Likewise, the Saudis are terrified of an Arab Shiite state in southern Iraq, given that they have a significant Shiite majority in their nearby Eastern Province. This province, al-Hasa, is where the Saudi petroleum is, and the Shiites provide many of the workers on the oil rigs. The Wahhabi Saudis, hyper-Sunnis, largely despise Shiites and do not want theirs becoming uppity. A partition opposed to the death by Iraq's three wealthiest and most powerful neighbors seems destined to fail. Moreover, it probably would not be good for Iraqis to be reduced to a set of small, weak and in some cases poor countries. Nor is it clear that Iraqi democracy would be served by partition, as Anderson and Stansfield argue. The corporate solidarity along religious and ethnic lines visible in Sunni Arab Falluja or in Shiite Basra, which sometimes turns coercive or violent, is a less promising basis for democracy than a federal Iraq where parties will over time prosper best if they can find ways of appealing across ethnic boundaries.
The real danger facing working-class Iraqis, the vast majority of the country, is not that they will be forced to coexist with those who pray differently or speak different first languages. The most pressing threat is that the Bush Administration's economic shock therapy and other policies will create a new, small clique of robber barons who monopolize most of the country's resources. That is where we came in.
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