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Segregation For Iraq: Some Bad Ideas Never Die
A disturbing number of people have been praising Vice President Joe Biden’s plan to partition Iraq. In its original form, The Biden Plan was to have a greater degree of federalization of Iraqi governmental power with the 19 governorates being split into four regions (Sunni Arab, Shia Arab, Kurdish, and Baghdad), protected by a UN resolution, with four goals: 1) to change the federal structure of Iraq by creating a level of regional government between the governorates and the federal government; 2) to allocate oil revenues; 3) to protect women’s rights; and 4) to allow the US to withdraw militarily by 2008. A few months later, Biden updated his plan to lose Baghdad as a separate region, to drop women’s rights, and to include a new jobs program to be paid for by the Gulf States that would protect minority rights (how we’d make the Saudis go along with that last demand was never clear). He modeled both plans on the segregationist Dayton Accords in Bosnia.
Despite Biden’s plan not being implemented, two of these goals have happened anyway: the oil revenues have achieved ever greater degrees of formalized allocation, and women’s rights have been supported. On the other hand, the Surge happened and the Iraqis didn’t want regional level governments. The governorates (essentially, provinces) were given the ability by federal law to federalize into regions, combining such that the Sunni majority governorates could establish a regional government with greater powers, the Shia could do likewise, etc. Regardless, Arab Iraqis chose not to take that opportunity; indeed, at no point did even two governorates attempt to unify. The Kurds took the increased powers allocated to any such region that existed and added them to their already considerable number of autonomous powers, but there was no other regional identity that was able to coalesce into regional government.
The international consequences of implementing the Biden Plan — had the US withdrawn militarily by 2008 without a Surge — seem quite apparent. As for a UN convention to get everyone to agree not to invade Iraq, while it might sound as if that would have been really helpful, ISIS would not have been a signatory to the agreement.
In short, other than cancelling the Surge, Biden didn’t propose anything important, useful, or particularly harmful. His idea was dumb, but compared to other plans to recreate Vietnam, his differed only in adding a few tens of millions in pointless spending. Most people in the West, however, think the Biden Plan was a plan to split Iraq into three countries.
There are six key reasons that The Biden Plan that people think existed was confused and remains toxic. The first through fifth apply to the Biden Plan as Biden described it, too.
First, Iraq is pretty integrated. A fair number of maps purport to show increasing ethnic purity in Baghdad over time (wiki has some), but those maps either exaggerate differences (in this one the areas “in transition” in 2009 mostly failed to transition as violence dropped off) or claim entirely false differences; the “mostly [eg] Shia” maps are fair enough, but there are maps claiming ethnically exclusive areas that were not ethnically exclusive, as I used to discuss with the allegedly non-existent minorities from those areas. Even looking at those, you can see that Baghdad couldn’t be neatly parceled out. Because the US used a lot of these maps, you can’t read an account of life, or the fighting in Baghdad, without regular notes that “Person X was living in neighborhood Y despite being of the ‘wrong’ demographic.” In particular, many of the best-paid Kurds live outside the Kurdish regions, particularly in Baghdad. Partition would ensure that ⅓ – ¼ of Kurds would become foreigners in their own country (if, indeed, they were even able to stay).
Secondly, ethnic segregation is far more easily said than done. As Partition in North West India showed, creating an ethnic homeland for a currently integrated population is not always comfortable and does not always result in more moderate, balanced, government. The North of Iraq was generally more peaceful than the rest of the country, with a chief cause of tension being the possibility that something Bidenish would happen, meaning that it was very important indeed to have the right ethnic groups dominating the key border areas. Ethnically segregated groups often maintain hostility over time. One of the worst points of the ISIS invasion was during the early stages, when the Peshmerga thought they could remain neutral and let ISIS take Arab portions of Iraq; the bitterest anti-Kurd sentiment seen in a long time swept the rest of the country. Thankfully, ISIS then invaded the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the Peshmerga joined the fight alongside the Iraqi Security Forces, and relative ethnic harmony was restored. If there was an Iraqi Sunnistan, ISIS would have taken that, taken a good chunk more of the KRG, and be sitting relatively comfortably right now. People rag on the Iraqi Security Forces a lot because they suffered a major defeat in June last year, but they’re the best the region has.
Thirdly, offering hope to those who wanted to turn their chunk of Iraq into a despotic state isn’t likely to discourage them. Al Qaeda fought hard to make Anbar (in particular) ungovernable, and some Sunnis worked with them toward that goal. Sadr and his pals did the same with parts of their home turf, and some Iranian groups worked along similar lines. In each case — and, ultimately, decisively with Anbar — the impossibility of taking over the government of all Iraq was a key reason for abandoning the struggle. The same would not have been true of the smaller countries Biden proposed; Iraqi Sunnistan would have been much more easily attainable for the various insurgents who desired it, and would have been seen to be so. Sadr’s boys would have a much better chance of taking over the government of South Iraq, possibly in alliance with Iranians. Diyala, Baghdad, and other areas of disputed claim would have had much more motivation for ethnic cleansing. Most people don’t fight or support a fight if they don’t think there’s a chance they’ll win.
Fourthly, one of the major narratives in the Arab world when the war began was that America wanted to destroy the powerful Saddamite Iraq and leave divided, weak, nations behind. Since Biden’s plan was to bug-out at the precise time that all heck broke loose, we’d have been doing our utmost to demonstrate to the region that their worst fears about American moral bankruptcy and hostility to Arabs were true. We fought hard, and successfully, to persuade the Arab world that AQ is terrible. Essentially everyone but the Palestinians went from being majority AQ supporting to strong majority opposing. This would have undone that.
Fifthly, Iraq is a big government and fairly highly centralized economy, and society has grown up around it. The Kurds don’t want to be out of that because they get a much more generous settlement from the oil than they would get if they were independent; indeed, the chief reason businesses invest and base themselves in the KRG is as a base from which to do business within the rest of Iraq. The nationwide companies are multi-ethnic and multi-confessional and forcing them to redraw business plans and reorganize their human resources to match the new segregation would have been a nightmare. Certainly it seems unlikely that any of the organizations I worked with could lose their minority employees and recover within the foreseeable future. Saddam’s devastation of the education system meant that the qualified people were all either old, young, or ex-pats, and so there were many people who had learned on the job as cohorts and would struggle to work without their friends (as you can imagine, there are other problems with this).
Sixthly, Iraqis of all ethnicities and faiths predictably, vociferously, and passionately rejected — and continue to reject — The Biden Plan. Iraqi ex-pats often supported independence from each other, particularly ex-pat Kurds, leading to a widespread perception that The Biden Plan had support. You saw the same thing with the Scottish independence vote: Scottish Americans and Scottish Canadians overwhelmingly supported independence while Scottish Scots voted it down. The same was true for Quebecois, and for many other independence referenda. In Iraq, though, the two Kurdish political parties (well, three now, but two then) both agreed with all the major Sunni parties and the major Shia Parties that this was a terrible idea. Indeed, Kurds quite like the central government; a Kurd is President of Iraq, and the latest Gallup poll (a few months old) has the KRG giving Prime Minister Abadi a 53% approval rating, the lowest he gets from anyone in Iraq (72% of Sunni areas, the rest ranging from there to 78%), but still pretty good by world leader standards. For a variety of reasons, they have strong incentives to remain part of Iraq. They grumble, but they’ve never seriously moved towards independence, a move that they could easily have taken at any stage of the occupation, or since. If they declared independence tomorrow, it’s not like the US would let Baghdad do anything about it. For comparison, to see how sensible Biden’s Dayton Accords model was, contemplate Radovan Karadžić’s likely approval rating amongst Bosniaks.
I focus on the Kurds in the above list, but all of those six point apply even more strongly to the Sunni areas. For the Shia, the financial arguments go the other way, but they’re pretty seriously patriotic. Again, no major Shia politician calls for the breakup. Before the Iraq-Iran war, plenty of wise old men claimed that the Shia Iraqis wouldn’t fight for Sunni Saddam against Shia Iranians, fresh from their revolution. Those pundits were really, seriously, wrong. The one truly problematic domestic demographic for Saddam were the Kurds, who were Sunni. Iraq has been the hub of a multi-ethnic empire since literally before the beginning of history. They feel keenly that they are a great people, although 2008-2014 were basically the only good years they’ve had since 1979, and the constant catastrophe has worn on them.
The Biden plan would have encouraged bloodshed, collapsed the economy, and created at least two failed states that would have become key security threats to the US. It would have confirmed the anti-American sentiments of anyone in the region who even dreamed of having them before. It would have broken the hearts of the patriotic Iraqis who soldiered through decades of trauma only to see the country they defended from Iranian invasion, American bombing after Kuwait, civil war, another invasion, Al Qaeda attacks, and more eventually broken up and left in pieces. On every level — economic, military, political, and moral — it was one of the worst ideas to come out of Congress in modern times.
Published in General
Thank you!
Do you think it would be possible to work segregation back into the title? Do I need more text to support it? The “bad idea” that won’t die was, in my mind, segregation. Democrats still look to it as their primary response to racial tension (see also, gentrification, minority majority districts, safe spaces, and Bosnia). I’d like to write something else referring more explicitly to the lack of truth to the “all the racist Democrats became Republicans” narrative, and I hoped to use this as a building block in that.
That’s ambitious. I see where you are going, though. Very interesting.
Do you mean that you have a fondness for small government without federal structure? In other words, when you say that California should be broken up, are you also calling for Kentucky to secede from the Union?
The Kurds already have three Kurdish layers of government (the KRG, governorates, and local government). What generalized criticism of federal government that would apply to Iraq but would not apply much more strongly to America?
I don’t think I’ve ever met an Iraqi Arab in Iraq who didn’t think of Iraq as a country, and many have strong feelings on the subject. For Kurds, those feelings are more complicated. My bias here is that I have spoken to Kurds in three categories only; ex pats in the West, Kurds in South East Turkey in 1997, when the Iraqi government was really a different issue, and Kurds in Baghdad. Since 1/4-1/3 of them live outside the KRG, and most of those in Baghdad, though, the guys I knew out there aren’t a trivial part of the debate, and they often felt keenly Iraqi.
In most independence debates, though, money plays an extremely important part. It was almost the sole topic of the Scottish Independence votes and dominated in Quebec and Puerto Rico. That doesn’t mean that most Scots don’t consider themselves British, or that Quebecois don’t think that they’re Canadian. Some do, some don’t, and there’s a lot of variation in intensity. I hope you’ll acknowledge that the UK, Canada, and US are sustainable.
You’ll note above that the payments are only one reason that the KRG is successful because of its belonging to Iraq. The industry there includes a lot of companies who wanted to be in Iraq, but didn’t want to be too vulnerable to violence or to Maliki’s caprices. They have a lot of integrated commercial and governmental structures that, while they may not be super high functioning, are almost certainly better than replacements would be. There’s… there’s the rest of the list above, which I’ll defend individually if you challenge them, rather than preemptively reciting them.
The key information is the reminder that the two big Kurdish parties have been staunchly pro-autonomy/ federalism since elections began. In two party systems where both parties agree about something, there’s generally some stability in the agreed belief.
Again, I think that this is a confusion about levels of government. The KRG does have different state level government to Arab majority Iraqi governorates. If you think that the Inland Empire (do you mean the actual Inland Empire, Riverside and San Bernadino County? Because blaming California’s woes on two backward counties not participating enough seems eccentric.) should be kicked out of not just California, but the United States and that this would lead to superior government, then I feel like you should write a post about that, because it’s likely too novel and complex an idea for me to learn it in a comment thread.
1. You saw it after editing, so I choose to blame whichever editor inserted typos. Tom? I feel like my claim is stronger if the typo was in one of the places where they dumbed down my post by explaining what was meant by Partition (ie., that it refers to India, and with a link to it, and noting only the worst part (the North West), rather than the whole; there was ugliness everywhere, and East Pakistan wasn’t a fantastic development.)
I should note, though, that this grumbling should not be taken to suggest that I don’t recognize that this is a snappier title, that lots of people reading this don’t come from a context where Partition is important (I could apply for a quasi citizenship status in India and my grandfather learned English years after he learned Tamil).
I think Amy’s choice was better. In Europe, the Foreign Office wanted to rule; the balance of power thing was very important and meant that the UK traditionally took a lot of interest in what went on. In the colonial example, the foreign office just wanted to be able to ignore the countries.
I don’t think Biden wanted to organize the Middle East better. He just wanted to leave and wanted a spin on the standard surrender plan that would appeal to people who brought the never dying myth that Sunnis and Shia had always fought each other, or that Kurds and Arabs had always fought each other. Partition is generally the sort of slice the baby approach that seems to provide prizes for the largest lobbying groups, but that differs from Solomon’s solution in that the blood is actually shed.
Of course, in Iraq, opposition to Biden produced a rare show of unity and the plan was never implemented, so it’s sort of conceivable that Biden actually was showing the wisdom of Solomon and improving Iraq by pretending to support his plan.
I’d like to nominate this as the most pleasingly highbrow comment on anything I’ve written. The only gloss I’d put on it is to explicitly note that strife also helps weak agents cause mischief. Still, since I suspect there is no quote that addresses that as neatly, your comment may be perfect.
Let’s be blunt here – Turkey has an Islamist PM last time I checked, and the Iraqi central government is a bought and paid for subsidiary of Iran. The Kurds actually like the US and don’t generally hate Israel. All of the Kurds’s enemies are also our enemies. Naturally, that means our Dear Leader doesn’t want to help the Kurds, but we are not bound to that ideology here.
The Iraqi security forces ran in terror from ISIS, and I have yet to see evidence of their success at anything other than absorbing money. The national government of Iraq is corrupt and very sectarian. I fail to see any benefit to keeping Iraq in one piece.
I think way less of a threat than used to be the case. Islamism is terrible, but if you’re part of an Islamic minority it’s enormously superior to secularist fascism. The existence of the KRG is helpful in relieving some of the passion for having a homeland, since they, you know, have one now. AQ had already dramatically reduced the popularity of terrorism, and ISIS targeting the Kurds is pretty helpful in that regard.
The Turks are concerned about how the future of Kurdish nationalism works out. On the whole, though, I get the impression that those relations have gone a lot better than was feared. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in South East Turkey, but capitalism, prosperity, and mutual enemies can do a lot to bring people together. When Erdogan first took power, he had a lot of Kurdish support. He frittered that away, but it seems unlikely that Turkey will ever return to the sort of scale of abuses that lent passion to the conflict. There’s more positive momentum on Armenian issues than there has been in a while, too.
I defer to Claire on this stuff, but I feel generally bullish on the question of whether those are troubles in the past or in the future.
I mean American states should be smaller, we should have more of them, and those states should have more power. Large states with weak powers in a federal system makes them hard to govern, and large ungovernable states in a federal system make the federal system cumbersome. We should also triple the House of Representatives’ membership.
Not really being sure where to cut on the other comments -I do think American Federalism currently has problems, driven by the poorly shaped borders of the western states and the lack of a frontier from which to carve new states (moon colonies), talking about having three layers of governmental autonomy does not actually sound like an improvement to me. To me, the actual question is whether the Kurds have enough political and economic connection to the Iraq nation and their Sunni and Shia countrymen to justify the political merger -or lacking those connections, that they are willing to compromise on policy in return for cheaper government. Oil money strikes me as an insufficient reason.
The Inland Empire is here serving as a synecdoche for “regions of California that SF and LA look down on.” In turn, this is a blown up version of what I’ve found in the local government merger and fragmentation literature -there are no shortage of large cities that want to absorb smaller neighbors whether the neighbors want it or not. Invariably, the larger city ends up having to bribe the new acquisitions to keep the city running, with the result that outcomes are worse than if they’d never merged at all -and the larger city is harder to properly oversee by the people. I favor breaking those cities up, too. I’m not saying Staten Island or the San Fernando Valley should secede from New York or California, but they should leave NYC and LA.
Again, though, this is a lightly held belief, and you’ve moved me slightly away from it in the context of Iraq.
And the errata was just me busting your chops. Perhaps I should have put an emoticon after “Errata :)”
I’ll add it to the list. If you missed it, and want to bust my chops over it, the podcast from Nashville is now over on the member feed.
True.
Not true. There’s a lot of Iranian influence, dramatically increased when Obama decided not to help Iraq in its hour of need, forcing them to rely on Iran. Thankfully, the US eventually gave Iraq the choice of a little more freedom, and it’s taken it.
True.
This is often strongly overstated as a contrast. There are Kurds who don’t, but there are also plenty of Kurds who do. Israel is an extremely controversial topic in the KRG. There are dramatically fewer Jews in the KRG than the 38 Jews who live in Baghdad.
It’s hard to overstate the level of propaganda that people who watch Middle Eastern television and study Middle Eastern textbooks grow up with. The Kurds have some contrary influences; America and Turkey have both been helpful in that regard, and Kurds have benefited, as with essentially the entire Middle East, from AQ and ISIS diminishing the popularity of terrorism and increasing the acceptability of fighting Islamist organizations.
The KRG doesn’t really have a lot of state enemies. They oppose ISIS and AQ, but so does literally everyone else in the region. They have extremely close economic ties with Iran and Turkey. When the idea of a Iran/ Turkey/ Iraq Free Trade Area comes up, as it does sometimes, the Kurds are generally the leading supporters.
If you meant Turkey, with whom their extensive positive relationship is only part of their relationship, then it’s worth remembering that Turkey is a NATO member. I’m not sure who else you might mean.
No, I’m pretty sure that Obama likes helping the Kurds. It was only when the Kurds became the focal point of ISIS’ assaults that he decided to work hard to oppose ISIS. For Obama, what’s the downside to helping them? There are many times when the left opposes America’s allies, but there are lots of ex-pat Turkish, Persian, Syrian, and Iraqi Kurds who work as activists in the American and European Left, so they’re really not on that list.
It might also be helpful to remember that America is not the only intervening country. France, the UK, Australia, and others have taken similar approaches. Do you think Tony Abbot is primarily working with Baghdad because he’s a radical leftist?
So did the Kurds. Including both the Kurds fighting as part of the Iraqi Army and those fighting in the Peshmerga.
It’s not my fault if you don’t read accounts of the conflict there, but if you google it for a moment, you’ll find plenty of victories.
The Iraqi army is operating and is multiethnic and multiconfessional. The government, likewise. President of Iraq is a Kurd and the Defense minister is a Sunni. You’ll find plenty more minority posts in the government.
The notional KRG army, the Peshmerga Ministry, isn’t functioning. Instead, the chief armies operating are the armies of the PUK and KDP, the chief political parties. The KRG is not multiconfessional or multiethnic in its government or army as regards senior positions.
The Iraqi Government is fighting hard to free Sunnis from ISIS. The Kurds formed a tacit truce with ISIS.
It’s true that corruption levels in the rest of Iraq are often rated slightly higher than in the KRG, but the difference isn’t as great as between, say, Russia or other mid-level corruption regimes and the KRG.
There are lots of wonderful things about the KRG, and the Kurds are an amazing people. Non-partisanship, non-sectarianism, and incorruptibility are not on their list of magnificent qualities.
You present arguments that we should be good to the Kurds. The Kurds want Iraq in one piece. Supporting them is a benefit, no?
Do you see any arguments for separating Iraq?
Iraq has already clearly implemented the reforms you want (aside from the more power bit; that’s quite difficult to judge). Iraqi legislative constituencies are much smaller than American ones, and the average governorate has 2-3 million people.
I agree that oil money wouldn’t enough of a reason; the Kurds are more motivated by patriotism and history than the Scots, for whom it was enough reason. I’m not sure what sort of political merger you’re objecting to. Are you talking about foreign policy or are you objecting to the domestic jurisdiction of the GoI over the KRG as excessive? If the latter, could you identify some reform you feel ought to be implemented?
I don’t see the difference between this solution and what has already been implemented in Iraq.
I rarely listen to podcasts, but I’ll make an exception for you.
Interesting discussion. My opinion is that a large, tolerant, liberal, unified nation-state is not feasible in that culture. My own ‘plan’ for the middle east involves chopping everything apart into bite-sized territories that roughly encompass tribal affiliations and forbidding them to own any military equipment larger than a truck. All the mineral/oil wealth would be independently mined and the profits shared equally among the territories.
Please note that I’m not terribly serious about this. I’m pretty sure that the whole region is going to remain a chaotic, violent, oppressive sinkhole for the next few centuries. The best we can do is to try to mitigate and contain the worst of it.
I would suggest the two conversations are opposite sides of the same coin. The Partition bit is what Biden meant by his suggestion, but the Iraqis took it as the Divide and Rule bit. One could argue that our choices in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East would be better if we were trying to divide and rule, but the sad truth is that we mostly just want to wash our hands of the whole place and leave them so busy with each other they don’t bother us.
As for Biden’s wisdom with his reverse psychology, while I am cognizant of Christian injunctions of charitable interpretation, that seems a bit advanced for a guy who should have been kicked out of law school for plagiarism.
When I was in Iraq (2010-2011), the violent death rate was lower than in some American cities. That’s generally true for the Middle East. When AQ kills people, it makes the news, but outside the peak years leading into the Surge, it didn’t rack up all that large a number of kills. ISIS and Assad are genuinely terrible, but they’re not as common as one might think. Most Middle Eastern countries, like most Eastern European countries, are badly run and way less modern than one would like, but they’re gradually improving, much like Eastern Europe.
I think St. Louis and New Orleans are pretty terribly run, too (hence the violence), but extrapolating that forward and saying that a hundred years from now these cities will still be homicidal and corrupt seems hard to support. New York’s change is the obvious example, but there have been lots of times that areas that have not been law abiding or civilized have become so. San Francisco, for instance, had a window of being quite nice in the early 20th century.
Lots of information. Thanks, James. Back to work.
You are right James! I looked for a quote that applied more directly to weak agents, or what Madison called internal strife, but the above was the best I could do. And nothing says highbrow like “Amphyctionic confederacy”!
An eminently accessible exploration of a nearly-incomprehensible situation, James! Where were you when Mr. Biden needed you? Thanks so much; looking forward to more!