Here is yet another voice advocating a three state solution to the mess in Iraq. Ivan Eland is a libertarian who opposed the war. Now he supports the three state solution as the best way out:
If the United States withdrew its forces and each group was allowed to govern itself in its own country or autonomous region, the incentives for violence against the foreign invader and against other Iraqi groups would rapidly decline. The Sunnis would no longer fight the invader or be apprehensive about paybacks from the Shia. The Kurds would keep the autonomy that they have had for more than a decade. Al-Sadr could no longer justify his violence in the name of repelling the crusading invaders and might be forced to negotiate with the revered Ayatollah al-Sistani for a position in any government serving Shia areas.Unlike other versions of the three state plan I have seen floated in the last year, Eland's at least presents partition as something that would flow from Iraqi self-determination. The other versions struck me as a bit more arrogant, the main question being "Should we partition Iraq?" as if it were an essentially American question, and not an Iraqi one to be dealt with by Iraqis once the Americans have left.
Still, one has to wonder how much of Eland's account is due to ignorance about Iraq and how much is just wilfully misleading.
It is more than a simplification to describe Iraq as split up into three simple parts - for most practical purposes, it's just false. Eland has no doubt heard of Sadr City, the Baghdad slum home to 2 million Shi'ites. He also must know that Baghdad is in the central part of the country - in other words the part that is supposed to go to the Sunnis in any partition of the country. Does he think they will go without any protest? Does he think they will embrace second-class status in a new (and newly impoverished) Sunni mini-state?
Iraq is tremendously mixed ethnically and religiously. Every region of the country is inhabited by minorities in significant numbers. If anything is guaranteed to inflame fighting it is partition.
Eland has to know this. I think he wants the U.S. out regardless of the consequences, and is afraid that if preventing partition stays a high U.S. priority, it will be tempted into a longer stay. But that leaves him with a position whose likely consequences - unless I've misunderstood him - he can't actually spell out.
That's not the only thing that Eland glosses over. To mention just another difficulty, Eland seems to think that the Sunnis won't mind being cut out of the oil revenues of a future Iraqi state. There's risk enough of a civil war over the Northern oil fields around Kirkuk (where a lot of Arabs live, partly as a result of Saddam Hussein's Arabification programs) without partition. With partition, the loss of these fields would be even more bitter to whoever gets screwed out of them (the Kurds or the Sunnis), since there would not even be the consolation that some of the revenues might go to a central authority and from there redistributed to the poorer region.
It's easy to bitch about plans for Iraq, since they're all transparently bad at this point. But, as I've said before, it's a bad sign if you can't really bring yourself to honestly describe the consequences of your plan.
Still, I confess I really haven't been able to come up with much beyond the weak suggestion that the U.S. ought to commit publicly to withdraw all its troops by sometime in late 2005 for good, appoint a non-political caretaker government until elections, bring the U.N. in, cede genuine control to it, continue to attempt to train an Iraqi force, hold elections, and then keep its promise to leave. That's likely to end in disaster, but it's the least likely of all the alternatives to end in disaster, so it's what I'm hoping for right now.
Posted by Chris at May 20, 2004 09:47 PM