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Post-Constitution Iraq at Crossroads

By: Sabah Salih

Nov 29, 2008

In voting massively in favor of Iraq’s recently approved constitution, it is obvious that the Kurds have decided that the document is not without some important merit. For one thing, the document enshrines into law the right of Kurdistan as a self-governing region, not a small thing when you consider how shabbily Kurdistan used to be treated by successive Arab regimes. At a minimum, Kurdistan will have no less control over its own affairs than it now has.  For another, the document promises to be a harbinger of what Iraq will become, also not a small thing when you realize that the document effectively ends, once and for all, the Iraq so dearly missed by all those who preferred the continuation of tyranny over the arduous challenge of replacing it with something more civilized.

But by far the constitution’s biggest plus for the Kurds lies in its strong potential for putting into motion a process that could eventually lead to Kurdish independence. There is reason to believe that the Kurdish take on the situation is not misguided.

The constitution is not, as many opponents of regime change argue, a document for tearing up Iraq: You can’t tear up a country whose supposed wholeness has always been a grand illusion. The constitution is rather the product and guarantor of how power is to be distributed among Iraq’s racial and cultural mix.  It is this reality that the constitution recognizes, and it is this reality that makes all talk of a unified Iraq so terribly misleading.  Rather than becoming less important, in the years ahead this reality will become even more important. Overtime Kurdistan will become as distinct from the Shiite land as secular Greece is today from theocratic Iran. So the groundwork for what Iraq will become is already in place, and the dynamics of that process are already in motion. The Sunnis, with help from the twin forces of fascism and global jihadism, will continue to kill and burn and speak mournfully of the days when they had the whole country for themselves; they may even participate in December’s election.  But even if they did well, they would be in no position to dictate anything to the Kurds or the Shiites. The Saddam-style slogans by which they define themselves and their vision of Iraq—an Iraq constructed along the dogma of pan-Arabism—will get them nowhere beyond their own impoverished enclave and al-Jazeera television.  Theirs will continue to be a politics of entrapment, a fossilized discourse out of touch with the emerging economic and political realities in post-Saddam Iraq. 

Like the Kurds, the Shiites, having already created a semi-state of their own, will now try even harder to make their turf stronger and more separate. They now realize they can only be masters of their own turf.  No matter how central al-Sistani is to their politics and vision of government and leadership, to Kurdish and Sunni politics he is nobody.  This means that Iraq has reached a point where no one group’s self-definition applies to the other; whatever lines of filiations were there before the regime change have now all but evaporated.  All matters will now have to be renegotiated on equal footing.   

Matters that will not only take considerable time but also create their own tensions and pressures, thus, in my view, deepening further the country’s cultural, economic, and political divide. Federalism, in other words, being a mechanism for separation rather than togetherness, will strengthen each region’s resolve to pursue separate paths. Indeed the path to federalism has already increased the Kurdish appetite for independence. Kurdish nationalism can no longer be blunted by anything associated with the idea of Iraq as a unitary state, nor by the feeble argument that the era of the mini state is over. Globalization may speak in post-nationalist terms, but in many parts of the globe it is still the flag and the national anthem that animate the soul. Today nowhere is this more true than in Kurdistan.

Yes, yes, the constitution makes no mention of self-determination for Kurdistan.  During the negotiations, the matter was raised but only as a distant future possibility.  You may recall that at one point Kurdish demand for federalism also received the cold shoulder from all sides, particularly the Americans and the Shiites.  But now, Sunni Arab objections notwithstanding, the matter is more or less settled. In much the same way, federalism will help create a new state of mind that will further divide the parties, killing in the process the very document that made all that possible in the first place.

Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA.