A year ago I predicted that
Civil War would break out in Iraq as soon as the occupation force left,
no matter how long that took, and that such a war would probably end in
the division of the country into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia nations. As
the Bush Regime beats a hasty retreat from its latest military,
humanitarian and PR disaster in the Mideast, that prediction looks more
and more likely. In fact, the civil war has already begun, as various
factions are already massing militias, assassinating each other's
leaders in the provisional government, and aligning with local tribes,
warlords and foreign military and intelligence supporters.
This week's New Yorker contains
the latest insights from award-winning investigative reporter Seymour
Hersh. None of the factions, he says, is happy with ex-Baathist hitman
Iyad Allawi, the man selected to be interim Prime Minister when the US
occupation force formally transfers power next week. The group least
happy with recent developments is the Northern Iraqi Kurds, who, in the
latest accord, have lost the guarantee of autonomy that had been
promised them by the occupying force. They are agitating for an
independent Kurdistan region (see yellow on map above), and the Israeli
military and intelligence services have a large force in this region
training Kurdish commando units. The Kurds have the largest military
force in the country, the 75,000-strong peshmerga army, and their
leaders recently wrote to Bush that if their autonomy rights are not
restored they will not participate in the new Shia-controlled
government.
Watch out for an attack by the peshmergas on Kirkuk as the first sign of all-out civil war. This flashpoint city,
Iraq's 5th largest, is part of the historical Kurdish homeland, and the
centre of one of the richest oil areas in the country, but was
'Arabized' by extensive resettlement under Saddam Hussein. Hersh quotes
an American military expert who predicts "If Kirkuk is threatened by
the Kurds, the Sunni insurgents will move in there, along with the
Turkomen [the Turkish ethnic minority in Northern Iraq],
and there will be a bloodbath." Kurdish military action will also
likely provoke joint response from Iran, Syria, and (until recently
unaligned) Turkey, as all three countries have sizeable populations and
areas dominated by ethnic Kurds, who believe these lands should be part
of a greater Kurdistan. Although Wolfowitz apparently favours an
independent Kurdish state in Iraq, and the Israelis would be delighted
to have the Kurds as an ally in the region, the official US position
remains that Iraq should remain united. That's easy for them to say,
now that they are leaving -- they can blame the civil war and break-up
on the new Iraq government and on the UN, who will oversee it.
There is a very real threat that the civil war will quickly spread
beyond the borders of Iraq. Turkey, which has become decidedly less
pro-Western in recent months, has said bluntly "We tell our Israeli and
Kurdish friends that Turkey's good will lies in keeping Iraq together. We will not support alternative solutions".
And Saudi Arabia, always the most reluctant, unlikely, and taciturn
ally of the West, has been the target of insurgents who are making it
harder and harder for the rich Saudi elite to hold back the fiercely
anti-American and anti-Western sentiment in the country and stay on the
sidelines. If forced to take sides between an Islamic alliance of Iran,
Iraqi insurgents and Syria on one side, and America, Israel and
Kurdistan on the other, there is no question where its sympathies would
lie. Its role, or willingness to sit out a civil war on its Northern
border, will be pivotal in determining the length and outcome of the
war. Look to them to try to look neutral, while financing and arming
the Sunnis, while Iran will be much more overt in its political and
military support for Iraq's Southern Shia.
What is particularly frightening is that there is little doubt that
Iran either now has, or will soon have, nuclear weapons capability, so
that, as in the India-Pakistan conflict to the East, it is likely that
nuclear bombs will be threatened by the area's bitterest enemies,
Israel and Iran. In both countries a threatened (but not actual)
nuclear attack on the other country or its Iraq allies would probably
be politically acceptable to the citizens at home. And both countries'
governments would welcome a foreign conflict to divert world and
domestic attention from their controversial, unpopular and morally
questionable activities at home.
It in unclear to what extent the Sunni Moslems of Central Iraq will be
willing to coexist with the Shia Moslems of the South. While Shia
Moslems make up 60% of Iraq's population, except for Iran they are
hugely outnumbered by Sunnis in the rest of the Mideast, notably in
Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey. And the Sunni central section of the
country contains most of the oil wealth and pipelines. When the common
enemy, the occupying force, leaves next week, the gloves between the
two factions may come off. That would pit Iran against the other
Islamic countries in the Mideast, a situation it will likely go to
great pains to avoid. Expect some back-room dealing between Iran, Syria
and Saudi Arabia, which may prolong the conflict but will probably
ultimately produce a partitioning of the country.
All of this is likely to mean a long period of unrest and continued
death and destruction, as a country with three peoples who dislike and
distrust each other, after a hiatus under Saddam and another under the
hapless and underresourced Americans, finally get down to determining
the future of their country. In such cases, Balkanization has been a
global trend for more than a century, so I will predict that there will
be, more or less, three countries, uneasily coexisting, after a
prolonged and brutal war. The South may combine with Iran, the Kurds
will agitate for additional territory in Turkey, but probably settle
for what they can get, and the Centre will be squeezed to share oil
revenues and infrastructure with both, and become, Yugoslavia-style,
all that remains of what was once a much larger Iraq.
The sad thing is that every country except Iraq itself stands to gain
from such a war. America can say it got rid of Saddam and then left
(people will forget the intervening year of incompetent occupation soon
enough, especially if the neocons lose power in November so military
involvement isn't further prolonged). Israel will have a new ally in
Kurdistan. Iran will have entrenched itself as the preeminent power in
the area. The Saudi government will once again be able to be vocally
anti-American and keep its people happy. Even the Turks will be able to
tell its Eastern Kurdish residents that if they don't like their status
in Turkey they can now go to their own new country next door. The
military contractors will all make a fortune, the mercenaries will have
jobs for their short lifetimes, and everyone will have Iraq as an
excuse for ignoring their own domestic problems.
The sticking point, of course, is the oil. The Western addiction to oil
is now being matched by a similar thirst from China. The corporatists
will, as a result, get free rein, no matter who is elected, to rev up
arctic, offshore and other eco-sensitive and wilderness area drilling,
the coal industry will finish off Appalachia and start strip-mining and
burning lots more coal in other countries, and the nukes will be dusted
off and fired up. At the same time the cost and unsustainability of
this addiction will start to dawn on North America, which will follow
Europe, at last, in accelerating use of renewable energy, and upping
the price of hydrocarbons to discourage their use (and grab needed tax
dollars in the process). Whether that's enough to forestall an energy
crisis unlike anything we could imagine is unclear, but I don't see the
intermittent sputtering of supplies from Iraq being enough to tip it
one way or the other.
My final prediction is that, just as in Afghanistan, the West will lose
interest in what's happening in Iraq long before the people of the
country settle their differences and truly begin rebuilding their
shattered lives. But at least now, that inevitable, bloody process can
start.
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