17 April 2007
The Integration of Iraq
Ambassador Samir Shakir Sumaida’ie wrote in the April 10, 2007 Wall Street Journal that Iraq is “far too integrated” for partition, whether “hard” or “soft,” to render a solution to sectarian violence. That is not a surprising statement for him to make as a Sunni Muslim whose co-religionists could in the past share in, if not control, the natural resource wealth of the country only by dominating the more numerous, and geographically better located, ethnic groups in Iraq – the Shiite Muslims and the Kurds. Moreover, he obviously was welcomed to his current post by a Bush Administration with whose alarmist justification for occupation he apparently agrees – preventing demons from bringing a war of terror to American shores and those of “our friends.”
It is not inevitable that the sectarian segregation of Iraq will entail economic disintegration or the disappearance of civil order. It could be just the opposite. Staid formulas of statecraft no longer rule collaboration between international communities. The European Union shows that business and resource exploitation can operate without regard for once stubborn borders or native language differences.
Progress in Baghdad, therefore, will probably come when the American superpower and its misguided sycophants lose their allegiance to the old order of nation states that has not served us well. The sooner that system is replaced with a new organization of world affairs, involving looser associations of people in overlapping communities of interest, the sooner will the world no longer be hostage to threats of violence from state or non-state actors.
Ambassador Samir Shakir Sumaida’ie wrote in the April 10, 2007 Wall Street Journal that Iraq is “far too integrated” for partition, whether “hard” or “soft,” to render a solution to sectarian violence. That is not a surprising statement for him to make as a Sunni Muslim whose co-religionists could in the past share in, if not control, the natural resource wealth of the country only by dominating the more numerous, and geographically better located, ethnic groups in Iraq – the Shiite Muslims and the Kurds. Moreover, he obviously was welcomed to his current post by a Bush Administration with whose alarmist justification for occupation he apparently agrees – preventing demons from bringing a war of terror to American shores and those of “our friends.”
It is not inevitable that the sectarian segregation of Iraq will entail economic disintegration or the disappearance of civil order. It could be just the opposite. Staid formulas of statecraft no longer rule collaboration between international communities. The European Union shows that business and resource exploitation can operate without regard for once stubborn borders or native language differences.
Progress in Baghdad, therefore, will probably come when the American superpower and its misguided sycophants lose their allegiance to the old order of nation states that has not served us well. The sooner that system is replaced with a new organization of world affairs, involving looser associations of people in overlapping communities of interest, the sooner will the world no longer be hostage to threats of violence from state or non-state actors.
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