Considering 'Soft Partition' of Iraq
The Day
By David Brooks
January
26, 2007
Iraq is at the beginning of a civil war fought using the tactics of genocide,
and it has all the conditions to get much worse. As a Newsweek correspondent,
Christian Caryl, wrote recently from Baghdad, “What's clear is that we're far
closer to the beginning of this cycle of violence than to its end.” As John
Burns of The New York Times said on PBS's “Charlie Rose” on Wednesday night,
“Friends of mine who are Iraqis — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd — all foresee a civil war
on a scale with bloodshed that would absolutely dwarf what we're seeing now.”
Iraq already has the warlord structures that caused mass murder in Rwanda,
Bosnia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. Violent, stupid men who would be the dregs
of society under normal conditions rise amid the trauma, chaos and stress and
become revered leaders.
They command squads of young men who leave the moral universe and have no future
in a peacetime world. They kill for fun, faith and profit — because they find it
more rewarding to massacre and loot than to farm or labor. They are manipulated
by political leaders with a savage zero-sum mind-set, who know they must kill or
be killed, and who are instituting strategic ethnic cleansing campaigns to
expand their turf.
Worse, Iraq already has the psychological conditions that have undergirded the
great bloodbaths of recent years. Iraqi minds, according to the most sensitive
reporting, have already been rewired by the experiences of trauma and extreme
stress.
Some people become hyperaggressive and turn into perfect killers. Others endure
a phased mental shutdown that looks like severe depression. They lose their
memory and become passive and fatalistic. They become perfect victims.
Amid the turmoil, the complexity of life falls away, and things are reduced to
stark polarities: Sunni-Shiite or Shiite-Sunni, human-subhuman. Once this mental
descent has begun, it is possible to kill without compunction.
In Rwanda, for example, the journalist Jean Hatzfeld interviewed a Hutu man who
had killed his Tutsi neighbor. “At the fatal instant,” the man recalled, “I did
not see in him what he had been before. His features were indeed similar to
those of the person I knew, but nothing firmly reminded me that I had lived
beside him for a long time.”
The weakness of the Bush surge plan is that it relies on the Maliki government
to somehow be above this vortex. But there are no impartial institutions in
Iraq, ready to foster reconciliation. As ABC's Jonathan Karl notes in The Weekly
Standard, the Shiite finance ministries now close banks that may finance Sunni
investments. The Saadrist health ministries dismiss Sunni doctors. The sectarian
vortex is not fomented by extremists who are appendages to society. The vortex
is through and through.
The Democratic approach, as articulated by Sen. Jim Webb — simply get out of
Iraq “in short order” — is a howl of pain that takes no note of the long-term
political and humanitarian consequences. Does the party that still talks piously
about ending bloodshed in Darfur really want to walk away from a genocide the
U.S. is partly responsible for? Are U.S. troops going to be pulled back to
secure bases to watch passively while rivers of Iraqi blood lap at their gates?
How many decades will Americans be fighting to quell the cycle of regional
violence set loose by a transnational Sunni-Shiite explosion?
I have become disillusioned with dreams of transforming Iraqi society from the
top down. But it's not too late to steer the situation in a less bad direction.
Increased American forces can do good — they are still, as David Ignatius says,
the biggest militia on the block — provided they are directed toward realistic
goals.
There is one option that does approach Iraqi reality from the bottom up. That
option recognizes that Iraq is broken and that its people are fleeing their
homes to survive. It calls for a “soft partition” of Iraq in order to bring
political institutions into accord with the social facts — a central government
to handle oil revenues and manage the currency, etc., but a country divided into
separate sectarian areas to reduce contact and conflict. When the various groups
in Bosnia finally separated, it became possible to negotiate a cold (if
miserable) peace.
Soft partition has been advocated in different ways by Joe Biden and Les Gelb,
by Michael O'Hanlon and Edward Joseph, by Pauline Baker at the Fund for Peace,
and in a more extreme version, by Peter Galbraith.
I'll give further publicity to their recommendations.
