Others have suggested that Iraq be divided into three states: A Kurdistan in the north, a Sunnistan in the center and a Shiitestan in the south. Leslie Gelb, the former journalist, US diplomat and president of the establishmentarian Council on Foreign Relations, argued for such a division in 2003. In his view, “the only viable strategy” would be to “correct the historical defect (of an Iraq created by British and French colonialists) and move in stages toward a three-state solution.”
Last summer, H.D.S. Greenway, a columnist for The Boston Globe, wrote that the “hard truth’’ is that most Iraqis “feel more loyalty to their tribes, their ethnicity and their confessions than they do to the concept of Iraq as an undivided nation.’’
Claiming to know how most Iraqis “feel” is a tad presumptuous, but that hasn’t stopped the legions of commentators and TV network consultants who regularly perform geopolitical CAT scans on people in distant lands.
Frustration over what to do about Iraq is understandable. Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is far more difficult than divvying up the pieces among the three major ethnic and religious groups.
In support of a three-state solution, some experts bring up Yugoslavia, which after the Cold War split into Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, and may split further into Kosovo and Montenegro. But surely the fragmentation of that Balkan region isn’t a model worth copying. Or have the advocates of secession in Iraq forgotten about ethnic cleansing?
Iraq’s division into three countries or autonomous regions would be traumatic because there are no clear demographic lines separating each distinctive group. Substantial numbers of Sunnis live in Shiite and Kurdish areas. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis and Turkmen call Baghdad home.
Advocates of splitting Iraq pay insufficient heed to the long tradition of inter-communal cooperation and intermarriages, particularly between Sunni and Shiite Arabs. An interesting footnote is that Saddam Hussein’s clan, the Tikriti, has Sunni and Shiite branches, as do many other clans.
Splitting Iraq could cause huge population transfers. Who will handle the logistics, pay the cost of rebuilding lives and ensure safety?
What would happen to the smaller population groups, particularly the Turkmen, the Assyrians and the Chaldeans?
Gelb suggests that representatives of those groups be given “the time and the wherewithal to organize and make their deals, or go either north or south. This would be a messy and dangerous enterprise, but the United States would and should pay for the population movements and protect the process with force.’’
Before carving up the country gains further currency, it would be wise to ask the “natives’’ in ancient Mesopotamia what they want. We may be shocked to discover that most Iraqis oppose the dissolution of the country into three new states. In any case, it would be instructive to submit the question of separation to a national referendum, as the Kurds would like to do.
Let’s imagine that the advocates of separation prevail. The resulting scenario wouldn’t please those in the West who strive for stability in the Middle East and the security of oil and gas pipelines.
In the south, Iran would find kinship with a neighboring Shiitestan. Cooperation between Arab Shiites and Persian Shiites would likely increase to the extent of blurring border demarcations. Who in the West would welcome the Shiitization of Iraq?
In the north, an independent Kurdistan would revive the perennial agitation for the sovereignty of the Kurds in neighboring Turkey, Iran and Syria. Periodic Kurdish uprisings in Turkey have been brutally suppressed. Turkey’s government already has said it would oppose a sovereign Kurdistan in Iraq. (All governments in the region have gone on record against breaking up Iraq.)
In the center, an independent, oil-poor and arid Sunnistan would unlikely be self-sustaining and could eventually fall under the sway of Sunni-dominant Syria or Jordan or be split by the two countries. That, too, wouldn’t promote stability in the region.
Advocates of Balkanizing Iraq argue that the country is an artificial British creation that never should have been fused into a single nation. That’s a superficial reading of history. Modern Iraq rose from the ashes of World War I.
As a single entity, it is older (1918) than most states in the post-colonial era. It is also far more self-sustaining because of rich agricultural lands nourished by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and rich mineral resources, principally oil.
Carve up the country into separate pieces and you might as well forget about taking advantage of economies of scale. Instead, count on three hostile neighbors coveting each other’s resources.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s not write off an entire country and determine what’s best for it as the British and French colonialists did when they drew national borders in the Middle East after World War I.
I do not presume to know how Iraqis feel. But I have known more than a few Iraqis, and I sense no grass-roots appeal to tear up the country.
If the Baghdad press is any indication, Iraqis across the political spectrum agree on one central premise: They belong in a single country. The platforms of political parties, with the exception of the most ardent Kurdish nationalists, vow to preserve a single Iraq.
Rather than emphasize what separates one Iraqi from another, keep in mind the elements for homogeneity. More than 75 percent of the population is Arab. More than 95 percent is Muslim. The predominant language and culture is Arab.
The infighting isn’t over secession. It’s over who or what group will control a single Iraq and the nature of the central government (Islamist, Baathist or democratic?).
Most of us are sickened by the daily reports of mayhem in Iraq and want out. The three-states idea has gut appeal if you believe that the insurrection is nothing more than a civil war; let each warring group have its own country. That would be a neat exit plan, a sort of cut-and-run strategy.
The insurrection is not being driven primarily by ethnic and religious considerations, however. Rather, the main targets are foreign occupation troops and those Iraqis who are viewed as collaborators.
Those who issue dire warnings about a civil war underestimate the capacity of Iraqis to understand what’s best for them. Blood is thicker than water. Given half a chance, Arabs are likely to make peace with fellow Arabs and Muslims with fellow Muslims.
