What Can Be Saved?

by adam at 02:35 AM on September 11, 2005

I was going to post something about Katrina, but I've changed my mind and now want to say only this about it: if you have the time and inclination, actually volunteering and lending a hand would be a good thing to do.

What I really want to talk about is Iraq. The Prez has gone on and on about preserving Iraq as a single country, and the Sunni are frothing at the mouth over the prospect that even a bit of power in Iraq might devolve from the center. They're afraid of Iraq breaking up, and they should be: the Sunni areas have no oil, nothing of interest at all, really, and wouldn't be self-supporting if the country fell apart. It wouldn't serve their interests to let go of Iraq, but it would serve ours - we should make it happen in an orderly way before it happens on its own.

Iraq is not a "real" country - it was carved out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire by the British, who drew borders the same way they did in Africa - by grabbing as much land as they could and saying, "MINE!". The problem, of course, is that no one asked the inhabitants if they actually wanted to live together in the same country, and we see the results now just as we did in Yugoslavia. Only a tyrant can keep the mess together, and as soon as things start to loosen up a little the people who don't want to live together are going to start doing something about it, either by trying to secede or simply by walking next door and murdering their neighbors.

There are probably two workable states in what is now Iraq. One is Kurdistan, which has oil, stability, a unique ethnic and linguistic identity, and is also the home of the lowest men on the Middle East's totem pole, the Kurds. They've been kicked around by the Turks, the Syrians, and the Persians. They've been betrayed by the British and the Americans. They deserve their own country, and considering that the only people who really object to this are the same people who spent so much time oppressing them, they should get it. If we're lucky, they'll get powerful enough to invade eastern Turkey and teach them a lesson about revisionist history (but that's a different issue).

The other possible state is the as-yet unnamed territory in the south that's home to most of Iraq's Shiite population. It also has oil, and its people have also been victims of predation at the hands of Saddam's regime. There is a good chance that given the choice the Shiites would set up an Iran-style government in their country, but I think that stability in any form would be preferable to what they have now. Let their children start going to school, their farmers start harvesting their crops regularly, and they'll sort out the details one way or the other eventually.

That leaves us with the middle, the so-called Sunni Triangle. We might have to set up a government of some sort there, but only because we can't have the place just turn into Somalia II. The Sunnis have gotten used to running Iraq even though they were in the minority - sort of like the Afrikaaners in South Africa. Unlike the Afrikaaners, however, it doesn't sound like the Sunni have come to terms with the truth - that their days of control are over, and that they're only going to have a voice in politics commensurate with their numbers. They reject federalism outright, and fail to recognize that the alternative is not a return to their own dominance, but their outright exclusion from whatever comes of this process. They didn't vote in the elections and now have the nerve to commit violence because they don't have a voice. It is for their benefit that Iraq has existed for as long as it has, and we have no reason to continue coddling them. Let them play by themselves if they don't want to play nice.

We have a choice. We can break Iraq into reasonable pieces, and make 2/3 of the population happy. We can make allies out of the Kurds and (maybe) the Shiites, and we'll just have to deal with pissing off the Sunnis, who it seems we can only piss off anyway. Or, we can insist that this farce called Iraq remain a single country, make enemies out of everyone, and have the entire thing fall apart *anyway* as soon as we leave. I don't know why Bush cares so much about keeping Iraq whole, but I can't see why it helps us to do so.