It is becoming increasingly clear with each passing day that Iraq has been broken and it will not glue back together. And with each fresh report of a militia attack or bombing, it seems less and less likely that Iraq will be able to continue as it was. The country is now divided bitterly against religious lines that are thousands of years old. The Shiite-Sunni rivalry was only barely contained by Baathist totalitarianism, and Iraq’s current power vacuum has given rise to a battle for power centuries in the making.
Born from the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Iraq was one of several lines drawn in the sand by the victorious allies. For the most part, attention was not paid to the condition of the Arab tribes; instead, countries were made with only an equitable distribution of colonies in mind. The borders of Iraq fell on a cultural fault line. The Turkish Kurds resided to the north, the Shias to the east and the Sunnis to the southwest. For years under the British, and then under Sunni control via Saddam Hussein, no thought was given to the desire for Iraq’s nationalities to have sovereignty. Under the Baath Party, Shiite and Kurdish nationalism was brutally repressed. Resentments boiled under the surface, and when a chance for revenge arose, they exploded.
Iraq’s military groups have made it abundantly clear that their ultimate and unalterable goal is complete control over the Iraqi government. The Kurds, for their part, are happy enough residing autonomously in the north. Since 1996, the Iraqi army has not been allowed into the northern part of Iraq informally called Kurdistan. The Kurds have been allowed to elect their own semiautonomous government. They have taken the first step in what is sure to resemble the final sequence of political events in Iraq.
It was clear even from the beginning that there would be sectarian resentment. The Shiites of Iraq were repressed brutally by the Sunni-led Baath Party, and the Sunnis are justly afraid of vengeance. It seems there is no sense of national unity in Iraq; no real sense of togetherness. For many, the central question of what it means to be an Iraqi has a very vague answer. And the concept of “Iraq” itself is an alien one, rising from European rivalries nearly 100 years old. This aspect was hardly considered during the hasty preparation for war, and it is largely responsible for the explosions today.
There have been rumblings about dividing Iraq for quite some time now, but they have been dismissed as impractical. These are receding constantly from view, however, and right under our noses, Iraq has divided itself along lines that were present from the start. It is folly to think that a unified Iraq will arise from the ashes — that the Sunnis and Shiites will forget their family members killed in the conflict and decide to embrace one another. Instead, it is time to examine the calls for an Iraqi federation more closely.
Those in favor of a federated Iraq envision a loose confederation of three states: Kurds to the north, Sunnis to the southwest and Shiites to the east. The central government would have little role beyond a symbol of unity, and as an organ for distributing oil revenue. Each state would be able to elect a government that would exert full sovereignty, except regarding oil proceeds. It must be this way; Iraq’s oil is unevenly distributed, and one group or another is otherwise bound to end up with a controlling portion. Baghdad will be a hotly contested issue, as all three nations have a significant population there. It may end up shared or divided by the three powers.
While this is far from an ideal solution, it will at least assuage the fears all three have of a sectarian central government. There are several glaring flaws in the above plan, most notably the reliance on a neutral government to distribute oil revenue. However, it seems that any sort of stable Iraq must roughly resemble the state outlined above. Partition is an ugly thing, nearly always causing a wave of dispossessed refugees on the wrong side of the border. If handled incorrectly, it has the potential to erupt into mass rioting. Ultimately, however, it will give the Iraqi nationalities the thing they wanted from the very beginning: their own nation-states. It does not seem likely that the Shiite-Sunni rivalry will dissipate any time soon. There is too much bitterness, and too much has been lost by both sides for them to simply make up. By separating them for the time being, the seeds may be planted for an eventual reconciliation.
Pavan Vangipuram is a State News columnist. Reach him at vangipu1@msu.edu.
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