A Little Bit About Iraq

As of the most recent news reports, the draft Iraqi constitution (which is no Jeffersonian masterpiece to begin with) has inflamed the Sunni minority, and it's looking as if the Shiite/Kurdish coalition is going to have to approve the constitution entirely on their own. Thus leaving out in the cold the sizeable Sunni population of Iraq, the ones who are already supporting the deadly insurgency we know and loathe; and in the end it may not matter, because once the document is put to referendum (sometime in October), the Sunnis may just have enough votes in enough provinces to defeat the measure. This would then require new elections, and a new constitution would have to be drafted, and everything starts all over.

In the meantime, insurgents staged an attack in Baghdad itself that looks like it was the first serious test of the native Iraqi police. The police were driven back, and have called for U.S. reinforcements.

Or, in other words, chaos.

But really, what else could anyone have expected? Even before the U.S. launched its attack on Iraq, I could only see civil war as the likely outcome. Now it may just be true that civil war was inevitable whether we attacked or not. Take a look at David Fromkin's book A Peace to End All Peace, in which the history of Western meddling in the Middle East is detailed. The nation of Iraq was created during the period following World War I and, to make a long story short, its boundaries were drawn without regard to cultural and ethnic borders, but only on the basis of natural resources that could be exploited, and short-term political benefits to be gained. The result was a nation in name only, with Kurds to the north, Sunnis in the central and western regions, and a large Shiite majority in the south. The Kurds were essentially an extension of their brethren in Turkey; the Shiites were essentially an extension of their brethren in the similarly-created nation of Iran. This schizophrenic conglomeration was held together mainly by force of arms: first British, then eventually Saddam Hussein.

Much the same was true in Yugoslavia, where Tito held together a nation built of warring ethnicities, most notably the Serbs and Croats, who put aside, but did not forget, old grievances. Once Tito died, they went to war with each other, and atrocities like Kosovo resulted. It seems safe to say that eventually something similar would have happened in Iraq; but that hardly excuses the looming civil war that American intervention seems to be bringing forth.

More soldiers? Fewer? Complete withdrawal? I bounce back and forth. When thinking rationally, it seems to me that we need more troops in Iraq, to just get in there and get the job done; but then there are days when I think all that would accomplish would be to substitute our force for Saddam's, postponing but not eliminating the risk of civil war. Probably all we can do is, unfortunately, what the Bush administration now seems to be proposing: get them set up with some kind of constitution, however flawed, then get the hell out and let things fall apart so that we can blame the Iraqis for having allowed it to fall apart.

There's another part of me that thinks that maybe it's not such a bad thing if the Shiites take over and create an Islamic republic. For my reasons why, look at Iran. It's no secret that the ruling mullahs do not enjoy much popular support. The mullahs got their chance to run their nation and didn't do such a great job of it. The people want Western-style freedoms, and it seems only a matter of time before they drum the mullahs out of office. How much time I can't say; but this sort of change, generated internally rather than externally, seems the only kind that can generate truly positive (by Western terms) results. And if we were to just go ahead and let the same thing happen in Iraq, then it might take thirty, forty years, but perhaps at the end of that time we might find a real, genuine democracy taking shape there. If only we had the patience to allow such changes to happen in their own time, I suspect we would find that ultimately, American movies and TV shows are far more powerful weapons than our bombs and tanks.