President Bush's new strategy of transferring power
quickly to Iraqis, and his critics' alternatives,
share a fundamental flaw: all commit the United States
to a unified Iraq, artificially and fatefully made
whole from three distinct ethnic and sectarian
communities. That has been possible in the past only
by the application of overwhelming and brutal force.
President Bush wants to hold Iraq together by
conducting democratic elections countrywide. But by
his daily reassurances to the contrary, he only fans
devastating rumors of an American pullout. Meanwhile,
influential senators have called for more and better
American troops to defeat the insurgency. Yet neither
the White House nor Congress is likely to approve
sending more troops.
And then there is the plea, mostly from outside the
United States government, to internationalize the
occupation of Iraq. The moment for multilateralism,
however, may already have passed. Even the United
Nations shudders at such a nightmarish responsibility.
The only viable strategy, then, may be to correct
the historical defect and move in stages toward a
three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in
the center and Shiites in the south.
Almost immediately, this would allow America to put
most of its money and troops where they would do the
most good quickly — with the Kurds and Shiites. The
United States could extricate most of its forces from
the so-called Sunni Triangle, north and west of
Baghdad, largely freeing American forces from fighting
a costly war they might not win. American officials
could then wait for the troublesome and domineering
Sunnis, without oil or oil revenues, to moderate their
ambitions or suffer the consequences.
This three-state solution has been unthinkable in
Washington for decades. After the Iranian revolution
in 1979, a united Iraq was thought necessary to
counter an anti-American Iran. Since the gulf war in
1991, a whole Iraq was deemed essential to preventing
neighbors like Turkey, Syria and Iran from picking at
the pieces and igniting wider wars.
But times have changed. The Kurds have largely been
autonomous for years, and Ankara has lived with that.
So long as the Kurds don't move precipitously toward
statehood or incite insurgencies in Turkey or Iran,
these neighbors will accept their autonomy. It is true
that a Shiite self-governing region could become a
theocratic state or fall into an Iranian embrace. But
for now, neither possibility seems likely.
There is a hopeful precedent for a three-state
strategy: Yugoslavia after World War II. In 1946,
Marshal Tito pulled together highly disparate ethnic
groups into a united Yugoslavia. A Croat himself, he
ruled the country from Belgrade among the majority and
historically dominant Serbs. Through clever politics
and personality, Tito kept the peace peacefully.
When Tito died in 1980, several parts of Yugoslavia
quickly declared their independence. The Serbs, with
superior armed forces and the arrogance of traditional
rulers, struck brutally against Bosnian Muslims and
Croats.
Europeans and Americans protested but — stunningly
and unforgivably — did little at first to prevent the
violence. Eventually they gave the Bosnian Muslims and
Croats the means to fight back, and the Serbs accepted
separation. Later, when Albanians in the Serb province
of Kosovo rebelled against their cruel masters, the
United States and Europe had to intervene again. The
result there will be either autonomy or statehood for
Kosovo.
The lesson is obvious: overwhelming force was the
best chance for keeping Yugoslavia whole, and even
that failed in the end. Meantime, the costs of
preventing the natural states from emerging had been
terrible.
The ancestors of today's Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds
have been in Mesopotamia since before modern history.
The Shiites there, unlike Shiites elsewhere in the
Arab world, are a majority. The Sunnis of the region
gravitate toward pan-Arabism. The non-Arab Kurds speak
their own language and have always fed their own
nationalism.
The Ottomans ruled all the peoples of this land as
they were: separately. In 1921, Winston Churchill
cobbled the three parts together for oil's sake under
a monarch backed by British armed forces. The Baathist
Party took over in the 1960's, with Saddam Hussein
consolidating its control in 1979, maintaining unity
through terror and with occasional American help.
Today, the Sunnis have a far greater stake in a
united Iraq than either the Kurds or the Shiites.
Central Iraq is largely without oil, and without oil
revenues, the Sunnis would soon become poor cousins.
The Shiites might like a united Iraq if they
controlled it — which they could if those elections
Mr. Bush keeps promising ever occur. But the Kurds and
Sunnis are unlikely to accept Shiite control, no
matter how democratically achieved. The Kurds have the
least interest in any strong central authority, which
has never been good for them.
A strategy of breaking up Iraq and moving toward a
three-state solution would build on these realities.
The general idea is to strengthen the Kurds and
Shiites and weaken the Sunnis, then wait and see
whether to stop at autonomy or encourage statehood.
The first step would be to make the north and south
into self-governing regions, with boundaries drawn as
closely as possible along ethnic lines. Give the Kurds
and Shiites the bulk of the billions of dollars voted
by Congress for reconstruction. In return, require
democratic elections within each region, and
protections for women, minorities and the news media.
Second and at the same time, draw down American
troops in the Sunni Triangle and ask the United
Nations to oversee the transition to self-government
there. This might take six to nine months; without
power and money, the Sunnis may cause trouble.
For example, they might punish the substantial
minorities left in the center, particularly the large
Kurdish and Shiite populations in Baghdad. These
minorities must have 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.
The Sunnis could also ignite insurgencies in the
Kurdish and Shiite regions. To counter this, the
United States would already have redeployed most of
its troops north and south of the Sunni Triangle,
where they could help arm and train the Kurds and
Shiites, if asked.
The third part of the strategy would revolve around
regional diplomacy. All the parties will suspect the
worst of one another — not without reason. They will
all need assurances about security. And if the three
self-governing regions were to be given statehood, it
should be done only with the consent of their
neighbors. The Sunnis might surprise and behave well,
thus making possible a single and loose confederation.
Or maybe they would all have to live with simple
autonomy, much as Taiwan does with respect to China.
For decades, the United States has worshiped at the
altar of a unified yet unnatural Iraqi state. Allowing
all three communities within that false state to
emerge at least as self-governing regions would be
both difficult and dangerous. Washington would have to
be very hard-headed, and hard-hearted, to engineer
this breakup. But such a course is manageable, even
necessary, because it would allow us to find Iraq's
future in its denied but natural past.
