Decentralizing Iraqi
Governance Is the Last Hope
May 21, 2007
Ivan Eland
After initially spurning the Iraq Study Group’s
(ISG) recommendations, President Bush now seems inclined toward the ISG’s
recommendation of transforming the U.S. military’s role from fighting insurgents
and militias into a smaller force that would train Iraqi forces in seeming
perpetuity. Although this solution would lower U.S. casualties, and perhaps
increase Republican chances in the 2008 elections, it will do little to dampen
the combination of guerrilla and civil war in Iraq. A more radical solution is
needed: a dramatic decentralization of Iraqi governance.
This ISG strategy has actually already been
tried and has failed. U.S. forces have been training Iraqis for years but the
Bush administration elected to spearhead the surge into Baghdad with U.S. forces
because Iraqi units were unreliable. Like the Vietnam War, where the
substitution of U.S.–trained South Vietnamese forces for withdrawing U.S. forces
failed, the same plan will fail in Iraq. In Iraq, the United States is in a
worse situation because it disbanded the Iraq Army and had to start from
scratch.
“Iraqization” will fail for the same reason
that “Vietnamization” did—societal cleavages prevent a “national” army from
saving a fractured country. After the U.S.–approved coup that threw out South
Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese government never had
any legitimacy with its own people and became infiltrated with Viet Cong. In an
Iraqi society ruptured by three wars, international economic sanctions, and
Saddam Hussein’s divide-and-conquer style of ruling, the United States can train
Iraqi forces ad infinitum but their first loyalty will be to their
ethnic/sectarian/tribal groups rather than to the Iraqi state.
In any solution to the Iraq problem, the two
main causes of the violence must be eliminated. The first is the U.S.
occupation. The second is suspicions that one ethnic/sectarian group in Iraq
will use a strong central government to oppress the other groups. To eliminate
the two major sources of violence, the United States should use an immediate
withdrawal of its forces to motivate Iraqi factions to decentralize the country
into a loose confederation of autonomous regions. Iraq has already been
effectively divided into autonomous areas, and Sunni insurgents and Kurdish and
Shi’ite militias are governing those regions. What is needed is to have all
Iraqi groups agree to this decentralized arrangement and adjust the boundaries.
The Iraqi Constitution already allows for a great deal of decentralization, and
the major obstacle is to get the Sunnis, who have little oil in their region, to
agree to such a devolution of power. The actual details of the confederation
have to be negotiated among the Iraqi groups or it will not be viable, but some
suggestions could be offered.
The Sunnis could be given oil wells in the
northern and southern parts of the country. Merely sharing oil revenues among
the regions probably would not work because the Sunnis would be suspicious that
the Kurdish and Shi’ite regional governments would eventually cut them off from
such proceeds.
Thus, the boundaries of the autonomous regions
may not always be contiguous, because of the oil deposits and because
ethnic/sectarian boundaries do not permit it. It is a fallacy, however, that
such boundaries need to be contiguous for a successful outcome.
A loose confederation of Iraqi mini-states
could mitigate some of the problems that an outright partition of the country
might create. Turkey might be less concerned that an independent Iraqi Kurdish
state might foment further unrest and desires of separation among Turkish Kurds.
Increased influence of Shi’ite Iran over the Shi’a in southern Iraq, a natural
by-product of the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein, might be ameliorated if
there were no independent Shi’ite mini-states in the south.
In such a confederation, the central government
could be very weak and might only have the power to conduct foreign policy—for
example, diplomacy and trade negotiations with other nations—and prohibit any
internal barriers to commerce within the confederation. The regional governments
could provide security and other governmental functions.
Obviously, the Iraqis would have to determine
the specific boundaries of the autonomous regions, and this could be
contentious—especially around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Yet the Bush
administration has no other viable choice in trying to stanch a situation
spinning rapidly out of control. Even this solution may not work because the
factions in Iraq are splintering and may not be able to enforce any agreement
reached with other groups. The decentralized solution would have had a better
chance if it had been adopted two years ago. But better late than never. It is
Iraq’s last hope.
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Ivan
Eland
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Ivan Eland is Director of the
Center on Peace & Liberty
at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State
University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national
security policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of
Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for
Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for
the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the
Congressional Budget Office. He is author of the books,
The Empire
Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and
Putting
“Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.
Full
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