Ray St. Louis
4/5/06
BETWEEN THE LINES
How does the phrase go—something about recognizing the elephant in the room?
There’s a huge elephant in the US foreign policy room: a unified democratic Iraq is not going to
happen.
Before we spend more billions of dollars and sacrifice more thousands of lives, we need to accept the
truth that is staring us in the face. That is, Iraq is too fragmented to unify in the absence of a
totalitarian dictator like Saddam Hussein.
What is likely to happen is that Iraq will go the way of the former Yugoslavia, which took two and a half
decades of civil war, sectarian violence, and ethnic cleansing to fully disintegrate after the death of its
long-running Cold War dictator, Marshall Tito. What was one country is now several.
The US, the UN, and NATO all got involved in the late nineties and first years of the current decade to
help direct this breakup and restore peace, negotiating a peace treaty for Bosnia (the Dayton
Agreement) in 1995, intervening in Kosovo in 1999, and putting criminals like Slobodan Milosevic on
trial for war crimes in recent years.
I see Iraq following a similar path.
How have I done on Iraq War predictions? Here’s what I said in this column on September 26, 2002
when the Bush administration was gearing up for war:
“America will first use the Bush doctrine (of preemptive war) as justification for invading Iraq and
deposing Saddam Hussein. That, combined with Ariel Sharon’s continuing pig-headed repression of
the Palestinians, will fan the flames of anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world to new heights.
“Once distracted by fighting in Iraq, our government will neglect the fragile government we’ve put in
place in Afghanistan to the point where it will completely destabilize. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist
organizations will benefit from the shift in America’s focus away from them and toward Saddam.
“As a result of all these factors, terrorism directed toward the United States will increase rather than
decrease.”
So, I wasn’t off by much. Afghanistan hasn’t yet completely destabilized, but it’s working on it. And, if
you accept the Bush administration’s contention that the people attacking us in Iraq fall within the
category of “terrorists,” then the final prediction is overwhelmingly on the mark.
Remember, I wrote all this at a time when Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were predicting a hero’s
welcome, no significant insurgency, WMD’s all over the place, and an easy reconstruction paid for by
Iraqi oil.
Here’s what should happen now: the United States should use its military presence as leverage to
bring the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds together for talks aimed at a ceasefire followed by
negotiations to divide Iraq into two, or possibly three, countries. Besides defining borders, the
negotiations would have to address thorny issues such as the sharing of oil rights. Once talks were
underway, America could begin a phased withdrawal of its troops.
It took a brutal dictator’s iron grip to hold this country together. Now he’s gone; and Iraq is slipping
into a civil war that is bound to tear the country apart for years to come. The best America can do is
to accept the inevitable and facilitate the transition.