The Three-State Solution? (Page 4)

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.

Iraq's problems during the past eighty-four years cannot, however, be explained by calling it an artificial nation, and for all their divisions, most Iraqis are deeply opposed to partition, particularly one imposed by the US Army. Even if it were not the case that all nations are, in some sense, artificial, it is hard to see how "naturalness" or the lack thereof has driven any major political movements. Nor is Iraq's modern history particularly short compared with its neighbors, which achieved their independence from the 1920s to the 1940s. The argument may refer to the coexistence of Kurds and Arabs in the same state, but then most countries are multicultural, myths of national unity notwithstanding. Iraq's problems have for the most part derived from the extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a succession of minority cliques--a state of affairs that the Americans may be in the process of fostering once again by their extreme economic liberalization policies.

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.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.