Frenemies or Partition

As Iraq continues to fall into the hands of the group called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), in the US, one set blames it on the original Bush-Blair invasion while the other set blames it on the subsequent withdrawal of US troops. Regardless of their internal politics, the US cannot and will not walk away from this entirely because of, duh, the oil.

So with hindsight, was Saddam a necessary evil who, if nothing else, held the country together? Even Feisal Istrabadi, Iraq’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations from 2004-2007, who bristles at the question seems to agree that things have spun totally out of control after Saddam’s fall:

“Let me first address the first part of your remark about, ‘well, [Saddam] may have been unpleasant, but …’ This is a man who is guilty of the deaths of no less than one million Iraqis over a period of 35 years. So there is no ‘he may have been a brutal tyrant’ … there is no ‘but’ after that, there’s no comma after that phrase. It’s a period. Having said that, I can say that none of my aspirations for Iraq have come true. My worst fears, my greatest nightmares, have all been exceeded.”

It’s not only politics that makes for strange bedfellows; so does geopolitics. A jihadist, Sunni controlled Iraq suddenly makes Iran and the US share a common enemy! As Andrew Sullivan puts it, “The enemy of my enemy is my frenemy”.

Daniel Hannan asks the forbidden question: was Iraq an artificial country to begin with, created by Western powers, with no ethnic or religious unifying theme that was bound to fall apart the moment there was no strong, central and necessarily brutal ruler? Taking it a step further, he wonders whether partition is not the logical solution?

“How much disorder, horror, fear and mutiny might have been avoided had Iraq been divided along ethnographic lines in 2003 – or, better yet, in 1920...More to the point, look at the consequences of non-partition. The civil wars have driven 2.1 million Iraqis and 1.4 million Syrians into exile. How much worse do things have to get before we consider an alternative?”

But partitions rarely happen smoothly: remember India and Pakistan? Or how Bangladesh was created? Or how Yugoslavia split only after a civil war followed by American intervention? Try telling a country’s factions that they partition amicably and all you’ll get is a civil war where the winner will take the entire country and treat all the other groups as second class, never to be trusted citizens. That hardly sounds like a stable solution, does it? So even if Hannan is right about the solution, the question remains: who will make it happen?