05 September 2008
Breaking Up Iraq
In his OpEd article in the August 29, 2008 Wall Street Journal, Dan Senor plays the retroactive justification game on behalf of the Bush Administration’s Iraq Invasion strategy. He calls on Senator Biden to admit that the plan that Biden had advocated for allowing the partitioning of Iraq had possibly been overtaken by events. In fact, the following may only be an academic exercise; but there are several inaccuracies in Mr. Senor’s distinction between Bosnia and the debacle in Iraq which, as a senior advisor to the Coalition, he helped to create.
1) The hostile parties in Iraq are not a monolithic entity. They cannot be lumped together as “the radicals.” Suppressing or defusing their fraternal violence only exposes their unresolved antagonisms.
2) Resolution of those antagonisms can only be achieved by bringing all the parties together, if necessary on a regional basis, in an atmosphere of non-violence. Negotiation of those issues would at best be chaoti, not bilateral.
3) The plan to hold Iraq together would surely require as many or more foreign troops than splitting the country into more manageable regional units under the supervision of an international organization.
4) There is really no need for any of those regional units to be culturally uniform. The partition of India and Pakistan resulted in integrated populations. Autonomy is ore important than uniformity. The settlement should allow individuals to decide whether or not to relocate for personal reasons and to take pride in belonging to one sect or another with its own territorial patrimony.
5) There will not be a windfall for the Kurds from Iraq’s regional division. The settlement between the regions must require all three to share wealth and hardship. Besides, Turkey and Iran, for geographic reasons, will always be able to prevent the Kurds in Iraq from obtaining independent outlets for their oil resources and thereby becoming a financial center of gravity for their neighboring Kurdish minorities.
The future of Iraq depends on whether the government there can hold the state together without outside enforcement. Is providing that enforcement a worthwhile U.S. goal? Wouldn’t it be no less expensive, and far less bloody, for the U.N. to take this on at our expense? The U.S. should admit that our mistake was to invade, not to propose possible strategies for correcting our rash error.
In his OpEd article in the August 29, 2008 Wall Street Journal, Dan Senor plays the retroactive justification game on behalf of the Bush Administration’s Iraq Invasion strategy. He calls on Senator Biden to admit that the plan that Biden had advocated for allowing the partitioning of Iraq had possibly been overtaken by events. In fact, the following may only be an academic exercise; but there are several inaccuracies in Mr. Senor’s distinction between Bosnia and the debacle in Iraq which, as a senior advisor to the Coalition, he helped to create.
1) The hostile parties in Iraq are not a monolithic entity. They cannot be lumped together as “the radicals.” Suppressing or defusing their fraternal violence only exposes their unresolved antagonisms.
2) Resolution of those antagonisms can only be achieved by bringing all the parties together, if necessary on a regional basis, in an atmosphere of non-violence. Negotiation of those issues would at best be chaoti, not bilateral.
3) The plan to hold Iraq together would surely require as many or more foreign troops than splitting the country into more manageable regional units under the supervision of an international organization.
4) There is really no need for any of those regional units to be culturally uniform. The partition of India and Pakistan resulted in integrated populations. Autonomy is ore important than uniformity. The settlement should allow individuals to decide whether or not to relocate for personal reasons and to take pride in belonging to one sect or another with its own territorial patrimony.
5) There will not be a windfall for the Kurds from Iraq’s regional division. The settlement between the regions must require all three to share wealth and hardship. Besides, Turkey and Iran, for geographic reasons, will always be able to prevent the Kurds in Iraq from obtaining independent outlets for their oil resources and thereby becoming a financial center of gravity for their neighboring Kurdish minorities.
The future of Iraq depends on whether the government there can hold the state together without outside enforcement. Is providing that enforcement a worthwhile U.S. goal? Wouldn’t it be no less expensive, and far less bloody, for the U.N. to take this on at our expense? The U.S. should admit that our mistake was to invade, not to propose possible strategies for correcting our rash error.
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