Soccer Dad

Iraq in three or four pieces

In The Partitioning of Iraq, (or here) Charles Krauthammer argues that the situation on the ground dictates the next stage of evolution of post-Saddam Iraq.

It took political Washington a good six months to catch up to the fact that something significant was happening in Iraq's Anbar province, where the former-insurgent Sunni tribes switched sides and joined the fight against al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, Washington has not yet caught up to the next reality: Iraq is being partitioned -- and, like everything else in Iraq today, it is happening from the ground up.

1. The Sunni provinces. The essence of our deal with the Anbar tribes and those in Diyala, Salahuddin and elsewhere is this: You end the insurgency and drive out al-Qaeda, and we assist you in arming and policing yourselves. We'd like you to have an official relationship with the Maliki government, but we're not waiting on Baghdad.

2. The Shiite south. This week the British pulled out of Basra, retired to their air base and essentially left the southern Shiites to their own devices -- meaning domination by the Shiite militias now fighting each other for control.

3. The Kurdish north. Kurdistan has been independent in all but name for a decade and a half.

Baghdad and its immediate surroundings have not yet been defined.

This is an extension of Krauthammer's column from last week advocating the possibility of change coming from the electorate/grass roots and working its way up to leadership. This week, he's arguing that partition (or a weak partition) is the effect of ground-up political change. The central government was weak, and now, to some degree, it has ceded control to events on the ground.

Krauthammer seems to be arguing that the central government needs to be weak for now, but not too weak so as not to invite unwelcome interventions. It's not the ideal.

The lines today are being drawn organically by self-identified communities and tribes. Which makes the new arrangement more likely to last.

This is not the best outcome, but it is far better than the savage and dangerous dictatorship we overthrew. And infinitely better than what will follow if we give up in mid-surge and withdraw -- and allow the partitioning of Iraq to dissolve into chaos.

UPDATE: via memeorandum

Max Boot doesn't really disagree with Krauthammer, except with his terminology.

Pretty much everyone agrees that there should be some degree of decentralization in Iraq, with the central government in Baghdad taking care of a few responsibilities (such as the army, foreign policy, and splitting oil revenues) and the rest of the governance functions delegated to provinces and municipalities (with funding provided from Baghdad). The chief success of American troops in the past year in Anbar and other provinces has been in beefing up local law enforcement functions, within a framework of a larger Iraqi state. For instance, the Iraqi army, composed of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, is actively working with Sunni militias and local Sunni-dominated police forces to fight al Qaeda.

That hardly constitutes vindication, to my mind, of those who advocated partitioning Iraq into three new states composed exclusively of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. That is a “solution” still rejected by most Iraqis: it would be almost impossible to implement without tremendous bloodshed because most of Iraq’s eighteen provinces have mixed populations. Federalism, on the other hand, is a way that Iraq can remain a single state while still recognizing great differences between different provinces. Why this should be called “partition” is a bit of a mystery.

UPDATE II: Does Jackson Diehl read Krauthammer?

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