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Iraq: Game plan for the endgame?

Hamid Ansari

“The primary objective of any counterinsurgent is to foster the development of effective governance by a legitimate government.” Judged by this principle, enunciated in the U.S. Army’s Counterinsurgency Manual, the latest American effort in Iraq is being described in the American media as a failure. The ranks of critics have now been joined by the influential Republican, Richard Lugar.

Jihad el-Khazen of Al Hayat, not given to hyperbole, reflects the intensity of feelings in the region: “The U.S. lost the war in Iraq and it is over. The Iraqis are being slaughtered today on the alter of the pride of an arrog ant administration that combines an ignorant president and an extremist vice-president to the criminal conduct of neo-conservatives … Will the day come when the war cabal is tried by an international war crimes tribunal?”

The strategy pursued so far sought “a technological solution to a political problem.” The latter was comprehended simplistically. Unavoidably, attention is now being paid to other options. The Baker-Hamilton report considered the full range of alternative approaches: precipitate withdrawal, staying the course, more troops, devolution to three regions. The first was unacceptable, the second unachievable, and the third did not deliver. This leaves only the fourth — a favourite with many since an early stage — to be considered.

The suggestion is that since the Constitution of Iraq does visualise governorates grouping themselves into regions, a formalisation of the latter into autonomous units (on the de facto pattern of the Kurdish areas) would lessen the intensity of the divide, allow the American troops to exit without leaving behind chaos, and retain the unity of Iraq by federalising it. The plan in its latest incarnation was put forth in a New York Times op-ed on May 1 by Joe Biden, the senior Democra tic senator in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Leslie Gelb, Emeritus President of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York. It was amplified in a paper published last week by the Brookings Institution.

The Biden-Gelb plan is developed on a three point assessment: that the counterinsurgency is a stalemate in which the insurgents cannot win and the U.S. cannot lose; that the inter-communal violence has surpassed the insurgency and is now the main threat to security; and that the Iraqi government is unable to control the situation. On these assumptions, the plan is (a) to have three autonomous regions with “a viable central government” responsible for border control, defence, foreign affairs, and oil revenues with Baghdad as a federal zone; (b) “entice the Sunnis into joining the federal system with an offer they cannot refuse,” that is, 20 per cent of all oil revenues; (c) link American aid to protection of human rights and ethno-religious minorities; (d) plan for troop withdrawal by 2008 and re-deploy “a small but effective contingent” to combat terrorists and “keep neighbours honest”; and (e) convene under international or U.N. aegis a regional conference to pledge respect for Iraq’s borders and its federal system.

The authors of the proposal clarify that it is a plan for federalism not partition, emerges out of the Iraqi Constitution and is not a foreign imposition, and is in the interest of all the three communities since it would produce a downward spiral of sectarian violence.

The Brookings paper by Edward Joseph and Michael O’Hanlon builds on the experience of Bosnia. It advocates a “soft partition,” recognises that most Iraqis do not favour it, asserts that Iraqi realities are beginning to trump theory, concedes that it would involve mass but voluntary movements of population (two million to five million), accepts that a carelessly conceived and implemented partition “could potentially cause regional destabilisation and conflict,” and assesses that its implementation would require a large U.S. military presence (over 100,000) for 12 to 18 months. The scheme would also need an official job creation programme, an arrangement for swapping houses and building new ones, and a complex oil revenue distribution system. It foresees a considerably reduced role for Baghdad and visualises “at least 75 per cent of government activity and spending” at the regional level.

The paper identifies the resulting benefits. Relocation would make the population safer. Creation of autonomous regions would simplify the international community’s role in Iraq, result in “a natural division of labour” with Sunni states policing the Sunni region, Americans helping the Kurds, and “a combined international mission working with the Shias.” It would provide the United States with an option since its “political system may soon reach a point where it is unwilling to sustain the current strategy.” Such a Plan B would allow the U.S. “to preserve its core strategic goal in Iraq.”

The plan, as in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, is theoretically neat, perhaps too neat. The critical question is of intent, and human fallibility. Portions of the Iraq Constitution of 2005 relating to the regions or to the second chamber in the federal parliament were not implemented on account of disagreements among political groups.

Would such an agreement be possible under today’s conditions? If not, making them operational now would take away the fig leaf of the plan not being a foreign imposition.

The efficacy of the implementing mechanism is of relevance. Tomes have now been written, many by insiders, about the sheer inefficiency of the U.S. government agencies operating in Iraq. Would they, or the Iraqi government departments with all their subjective considerations, be in a position to deliver?

The interests, and motives, of individual players need to be considered. Why would the Shias, having the demographic advantage, give up the whole and settle for a third of it? Why would the Sunnis put themselves, in perpetuity, in a position of total dependence for their livelihood? Why would Iraqi Arabs, Shias, and Sunnis accept for all times the de facto independence of Iraqi Kurds, an independence achieved through foreign military intervention and presence?

The same may hold for external players. The Kurdish region would have borders with Iran and Turkey, both bitterly opposed to greater autonomy and certainly to any suggestion of independence.

The Sunni region would border primarily Syria and Jordan and partly Saudi Arabia. The external neighbours of the undisputed parts of the Shia region would be Iran and Kuwait. This would leave an area in the south-west, desert, tribal, and bordering on Saudi Arabia, having a mixed Shia-Sunni population.

The Brookings paper concedes that (a) the new regions would not be “ethnically pure”; (b) the drawing of the boundaries would have to be done very carefully by “a strong, outside, non-U.S.” agency; and (c) the voluntary relocation of populations may first be tested on “pilot basis.”

Contradictions in the two proposals are not to be overlooked. Biden-Gelb visualise a drastic reduction in the U.S. military presence, to a level of 20,000 by 2008. The Brookings foresees a considerably larger, and longer, presence. Neither speaks of the permanent bases under construction in Iraq.

The two plans commit the now familiar folly of binary perception of sectarian violence. A study published on June 25 by the International Crisis Group does a case study of Basra to draw attention to Iraq’s multiple and multiplying forms of violence that “often have little to do with sectarianism and anti-occupation resistance.” It concludes that Iraq’s “division along supposedly inherent and homogenous confessional and ethnic lines is not an answer.”

The prime motivation of the Biden-Gelb plan, and of the Brookings paper, is to provide the U.S. an exit strategy to address the requirements of its political process. The question of the original sin, of horrendous dimensions and criminal intent, is neatly side stepped. Iraq, the region, and the world were made to pay for the first act; all are now being serenaded into a second act of submission. For the United States, accountability is restricted to the domestic political process; Nuremberg, Tokyo, and the Hague are for lesser beings!

Analysis, and record, compels a return to the question of intentions. Leslie Gelb’s op-ed in The New York Times of November 25, 2003, had urged a correction of “the historical defect” and advocated a three-state so lution for Iraq: “Washington would have to be very hard-headed, and hard-hearted, to engineer this break up. But such a course is manageable, even necessary, because it would allow us to find Iraq’s future in its denied but natural past.”

Can the Arab street be blamed for suspecting the real intent? Would some recall the July 2002 Rand presentation to the Defense Policy Board and cite it as an example of a game plan?

(The writer is a former Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations.)

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