There is only one handover they should be discussing in Brighton. It is not between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It is between Blair and a certain Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) in Iraq. Blair should devote his every waking hour to Hakim. The man has Blair’s reputation in a vice. Boys’ talk in Blair circles is still that “failure is not an option” in Iraq. John Reid, the defense minister, said last week that the 9,000 British troops marooned on Basra’s outskirts will stay “until local forces are strong enough to take control”, and that he “will not cut and run”. That must be scant comfort to those grappling with the bloody consequences of Reid’s barren policy.
Nothing shows the arid cynicism of British politics so much as its inability to discuss how to get the army out of Iraq with some honor intact. The cowed Labour Party dare not even debate the topic. The reason for urgency is that next month offers a window of opportunity. On Oct. 15 the new Iraqi constitution goes to referendum. Not only is it a good constitution in the circumstances, but it may well be the last Iraq ever sees. Everything should be done to persuade the Sunnis to end their boycott of it. Nothing would help more than a withdrawal of coalition troops to barracks between now and then, and a complete withdrawal thereafter.
In Baghdad, after the 2003 invasion, I thought there could be only one outcome to the Pentagon’s madcap demolition of the Baathist state. Iraq would split into three. This is roughly what the proposed constitution recognizes. Created by Zalmay Khalilzad, the neocon US diplomat-turned-realist, it is negotiated partition. Khalilzad’s achievement was to get Shiites and Kurds to agree to any shared central government in Baghdad.
His mistake, and it may be fatal, was to handpick hard-line Baathists to represent the Sunnis. Their resulting boycott was, according to observers, not inevitable, and it could wreck the referendum.
The constitution must be the most decentralist on earth. The notional components, Kurdistan and provinces grouped into regions for Shiites and Sunnis, would be self-governing except for foreign affairs, money and external defense. Internal security, taxes and legal systems are for regions; the Shiite south may opt for Shariah law, the Sunnis and Kurds for secular. There is no protection for women. An ingenious device distributes current oil revenue across all, but leaves future reserves to individual regions. The 115 army brigades and the police are already territorial, heavily penetrated by unofficial militias and mostly unreliable. The constitution has such forces answering to regional governments.
Partition is the only way the nation of Iraq might realistically survive. As the American diplomat Peter Galbraith remarks in the latest New York Review of Books, the constitution is “the most positive political development since the fall of Saddam”. Without it, the country disintegrates.
Yet the greatest threat to the constitution is not, as yet, Sunni opposition, but a primary cause of that opposition: The anti-Sunni war waged by the Americans. It fuels extremism and postpones the emergence of a constitutional Sunni army, which is the only hope of curbing Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s power.
Coalition forces have conspicuously failed to secure Iraq. It has been one of the most inept counterinsurgency wars in recent history, rendering all other progress and reconstruction meaningless. The occupation is universally hated. The thesis that Western troops are averting civil war is speculative, asserted mostly by those lacking the guts to admit their failure. Baghdad is seeing some 1,000 killings a month, exclusive of car bombs. Revenge squads roam every province and militias bar public roads.
There are nothing like enough foreign troops to prevent civil war. Yet their presence is enough to deny other sources of authority space to emerge. In the south such authority must mean the Shiite clerics, probably under SCIRI leadership. Only this is likely to end the chaos on display last week in Basra. It alone will curb the feuding Badr brigades and Mahdi army, and such shadowy groups as Al-Fartusi’s irregulars. The alternative is more of the present, Iraq as a proxy battleground of Iranian factions.
This must be decided by Iraqis themselves. Khalilzad’s still vaguely democratic constitution is as far as intervention can decently go. As Donald Rumsfeld rightly said recently: “We are not going to win the war against the insurgency, the Iraqi people will win it.” Yet he refuses to let them.
Iraq is sliding not into civil war, but into anarchy. In the absence of proper authority, people look to family, neighborhood and clan for security. The best Britain can do for the Shiites of southern Iraq is to show respect for this traditional structure. It is to heed Lugard’s dictum of indirect rule, to find the most powerful sheikh and make him more so.
Give authority to those who appear most able to sustain it, and leave.
Officials in London shrug and say the Americans are not ready to leave. So what? Blair’s weakness toward George Bush over Iraq is the talk of the memoir circuit. To let British soldiers die because he has not the guts to repatriate Britain’s Iraq policy to Downing Street from the White House is shocking.
Blair can simply tell Bush that the British contingent will leave Basra at the end of the year, irrespective of the outcome of the referendum. This would push to a crisis SCIRI’s relations with other Shiite groups. It would concentrate minds on the future rather than the present and past. It would strengthen Sunnis in resisting Zarqawi’s influence.
It might even persuade enough of them to see that the new constitution is their last hope of a just-united Iraq.
If this does not happen and the constitution fails, Iraq may fall apart. But that would have been Iraq’s decision. If we withdraw, we would at least make it less likely. We could argue that we saved Iraq from Saddam and gave his former subjects the freedom to choose. If they could not make the concessions to hold their country together, that would be their business. Yugoslavians and Czechoslovakians took the same view.
We cannot shed blood stopping them.
Meanwhile, the longer we stay, the more fertile the soil for Iranian expansionism. Of all the ironies to result from this adventure, nothing would be more bizarre. We topple the Saddam we once backed against Iran’s mullas, only to hand his oil riches over to them after all, to be converted into nuclear weapons.
Was foreign policy ever so dumb?
