Peter W. Galbraith's 'The End of Iraq'
By David Ignatius
Washington Post
Last year, I asked a retired Israeli intelligence officer what he thought about the American struggle to create a new Iraq. "Forget it," he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Iraq is not a real country. Let it dissolve into its parts."
That's pretty much the prescription of Peter W. Galbraith in his elegiac new book, "The End of Iraq."
"There is no good solution to the mess in Iraq," Galbraith writes. "The country has broken up and is in the throes of civil war. The United States cannot put the country back together again and it cannot stop the civil war. If it scales back its ambitions, it can help stabilize parts of the country and contain the civil war. But the U.S. needs to do so quickly."
By Galbraith's account, "staying the course" in Iraq won't just waste American lives and money; it will prevent Iraqis from reaching their own form of stability once the American enterprise collapses, as it inevitably will.
Galbraith's recommendation is to divide Iraq along its natural fault lines -- an independent Kurdistan in the north, an Iranian-dominated Shiaistan in the south, a Sunnistan in the northwest. If such partition were an easy process of tearing along neatly perforated lines, it would be hard to argue with the notion. But the old Iraq was a genuinely heterogeneous society, with Sunnis and Shiites sharing neighborhoods, intermarrying, even being members of the same tribes. Saddam Hussein's regime was built on the idea of "Arabism," a shared identity that transcended religious and ethnic fault lines -- by force, if necessary. Still, this ideology was remarkably successful. It's common now for analysts to say that this Iraqi Arab identity was fused at the point of a gun, but that misses the yearning for modernism and secular society that animated the educated middle class in the old Iraq. The only group that always remained outside this national consensus, in my experience, was the Kurds.
The de facto partition of Iraq has already begun, and we can see what a brutal process it is, especially around Baghdad. Sunni neighborhoods are being cleansed of Shiites and vice versa; death squads kidnap, torture and kill those from the "other" sect. It's hard to imagine that things could get worse. But they almost certainly would the moment the United States gives up on a unified Iraq. That would unleash a violent separation of populations and wholesale killing until Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish militias established what they considered defensible boundaries. Tens of thousands could be killed. Once stable ethnic cantons were established, the killing would diminish but not stop. In Lebanon, the separation phase was followed by 16 years of civil war that included artillery duels across the "green lines" that separated the cantons.
If things are as bad as Galbraith argues, it's possible that poor, ragged Lebanon may be Iraq's best model. Through all the years of its miserable 1975-90 civil war, Lebanon retained a president, a prime minister, a parliament, a national army. These governing institutions didn't do much; real power had devolved to the militias and to the regional powers -- Israel and Syria -- that had occupied Lebanon. But the idea of a Lebanese nation survived, as has been evident in the way its population has rallied around its tattered flag during recent weeks.
A partitioned Iraq, too, would risk being carved up by the regional powers, with Iran enfolding the Shiites in its wings, Turkey setting brutal red lines for the Kurds lest they try to wrest away a chunk of its own turf, and the Syrians and Jordanians sharing the thankless task of trying to maintain order among the Sunnis. Not an appealing prospect.
Despite its troubling prescription, Galbraith's book is important because he has lived the Iraq tragedy up close and personal. From the beginning, he focused his attention on the plight of the Kurds, becoming a kind of adviser and emissary of the Kurdish leader (and now Iraqi president) Jalal Talabani. This ardent identification with the Kurdish cause has simplified Galbraith's analysis: It's clearly good for the Kurds to achieve their dream of an independent homeland, but whether this separation is better for other Iraqis is a much harder question.
Galbraith first became fascinated with Iraq in 1984, when he traveled to Baghdad as a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had the gumption to press then-Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz about whether Iraq was using poison gas in its war against Iran, and he has been asking contrarian questions ever since. Galbraith's passion for the Kurds dates back to 1987, when he traveled to Sulaymaniyah and stumbled upon Iraq's genocidal campaign against them.
Galbraith sketches some reasons for the American failure in Iraq, but other books are doing that big analytical task better than this short book can. The value of Galbraith's account is that it's rooted in his personal experience -- why he loathed Saddam Hussein's regime, why he came to champion the Kurdish cause, how he watched as America turned a war of liberation into a bungled occupation.
I wished for a little more self-criticism -- an appreciation that the Kurds have been part of the problem in post-liberation Iraq, too, by pushing their own agenda for greater self-rule so hard. And I found a bit too easy Galbraith's transition from enthusiast for toppling the old Baathist tyranny to critic of the postwar occupation. The people who got it wrong sometimes seem to include everyone but Galbraith.
So what of the fundamental question he raises? Are we wasting American and Iraqi lives pursuing a vision of a new, unitary Iraq that has no connection with reality? When I put the matter to some of the Iraqis I have met in the 26 years since I first visited that country, they warned that, bad as things are now, they would be even worse if America pulled out suddenly. In the end, accepting partition may amount to accepting reality -- but that's a measure of just how bad things have gotten in Iraq. We made the mistake of rushing into Iraq without thinking carefully enough about the consequences of our actions. We should not make the same mistake in rushing out.
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