Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: The Bush Administration’s definition of political success in post-Saddam Iraq has changed almost as frequently as their rationale for the initial military invasion. Gone are the heroically optimistic predictions of peace, economic development, religious tolerance, and multi-cultural civil society in Iraq, which would then serve as the first falling domino in an irresistible cascade of democratization throughout the Middle East. Chastened by rising military, financial, and political costs, the Administration now speaks more soberly of satisfaction with a fairly stable, some-day reasonably democratic government for the New Iraq.
Despite the fact that the characterization of success has been a moving target, one definition of abject political failure in Iraq has remained a constant: the fragmentation of the country into separate, possibly warring ethno-religious enclaves. The Bush Administration’s emphatic warnings regarding the consequences of Iraqi balkanization have been echoed by the governments of at least eight Arab countries in the region.
Notwithstanding the Administration’s best efforts, however, recent events indicate that civil war and territorial partition are increasingly likely outcomes. For instance, July 2006 was the bloodiest month so far in terms of sectarian violence in Iraq. The peril of the situation was inadvertently acknowledged the following month by a leaked diplomatic note to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the note, the outgoing British ambassador to Iraq William Patey warned that civil war and a division of Iraq “is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy". Patey’s warnings were echoed just hours later by two senior American military commanders in testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. Iraq’s former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has stated, “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." Given the preexisting hostilities between the ethnic and sectarian groups of Iraq, partition of the country in the event of civil war is increasingly probable.
The heuristic exploration of just such a hypothetically fragmented Iraq is the subject of this paper. Specifically, it will apply traditional geopolitical methodologies of analysis to assess the political, economic, and military viability of an Iraq trisected into Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish political entities. In doing so, the paper will trace the roots of ethno-sectarian conflict in Iraq and compare Iraq to two divergent models of national devolution.
The paper concludes that the invasion of Iraq was ill-advised from a geopolitical perspective, that the demographic conditions within Iraq suggest that civil war and partition are likely outcomes, and that while the Kurdish and Shi'a regions would be quite viable as independent states, the Sunni rump state would face daunting political, economic, and military challenges.