ICG Report Sidelines Iraqi Kurds

By: David Romano

On December 22, the International Crisis Group published its latest study, “What Can the U.S. Do in Iraq?”  The full report is available at http://www.icg.org/home/index.cfm?l=1&id=3196

The study paints a grim picture of an Iraq that is rapidly spiraling out of control, and presents several policy recommendations to the United States.  Many of these recommendations, such as "systematically consulting and coordinating on reconstruction priorities and implementation and involving local and national Iraqi institutions in the management of funds,” are quite reasonable and should have been implemented a long time ago.

The ICG study periodically emphasizes three points in its recommendations, however:

1)      Various ways to encourage a united, cohesive Iraq rallying around a credible central state.

2)  The need to not insist on the TAL’s (Transitional Administrative Law) legally binding provisions (possibly throwing out the TAL altogether).

3) The need to disband militias and stop getting political parties to help staff the armed forces (referring to the KDP and PUK, whose recruits as a whole seem to be the only consistently reliable group in the new Iraqi army).

If the Americans add these three recommendations together (and their points are repeated several times), they would lose the only solidly pro-Coalition element of any importance in Iraq -- the Kurds.  These proposals might as well have been written by an intelligent Ba'athist, or someone intent on getting the Kurds up in arms and fomenting real civil war. 

The ICG’s Executive Summary and Recommendations do not even contain a single mention of federalism, but rather a thinly-veiled suggestion to throw out the 2/3 of 3 governorates veto in the TAL (which is in effect Iraq’s Interim Constitution) AND disband the peshmerga.  While this might be good for appeasing Shiite Arabs in Iraq, one can only imagine what the reaction would be to this in Erbil and Suleimaniya…

Maybe it's not an accident that the ICG has its closest offices in  Jordan – the whole approach in this report seems predicated on an assumption that the Iraqi population is as homogenous as the Jordanian one.  A "cohesive Iraq rallying around a credible central state"?!  How many Kurdish revolts since 1919, or mass graves in the north and south of the country, does it take to convince some people that there is a multi-national reality in Iraq, that centralism has been a catastrophic failure, and that Allawi's recent description of Iraq as an "Arab Islamic state" is exclusionary? The ICG and the international community should either strongly support federalism and decentralization, or accept a referendum for Kurdistan (for which 1.7 million Iraqi Kurds have already expressed support, by signing their names to a petition asking for such a referendum). 

Not advocating federalism and decentralization, while simultaneously stressing the need to maintain Iraq's territorial unity, creates a recipe for only one thing -- a return to authoritarianism and brutal suppression of Iraqi Kurdistan.  In practice, acting on the three policy suggestions described above and stressed by the ICG would lead to violence in Iraqi Kurdistan faster than you can say "welcome back Arab nationalists," or "only the squeaky wheels get the grease."

David Romano

Ph.D. University of Toronto

Senior Research Fellow, Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle East Studies (Montreal, Canada).