Leaving Iraq with integrity requires the Obama administration to ensure a secure balance of power within Iraq. That is made feasible by Iraq’s Constitution, properly understood. It also requires the new administration to encourage clear internal territorial demarcations within Iraq’s federation, especially between Kurdistan and al-Iraq al-ArabiM. It will have to inhibit fearful or aggrandizing interventions by Iran or Turkey and the provisioning of insurgents by Sunni-Arab dominated states.
These are very tall orders. They can be met. But they will require the administration to be guided by Vice President Joe Biden’s federalist instincts and by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Kurdish sympathies and not by the centralist dispositions of orthodox Arabists found in the State Department, the Pentagon’s planners, and much of Washington’s think-tank commentariat.
Numerous foul legacies shape Iraq. Some are partly America’s responsibility. They include the Baathists’ seizure of power in 1963 and 1968 and, lest we forget, Henry Kissinger’s endorsement of the squalid deal between the shah of Iran and Saddam that crushed the fifteen-year-long Kurdish rebellion of Mustafa Barzani. Expulsions of Kurds, racist Arabization programs, and boundary manipulations followed in Kirkuk and in other “disputed territories,” that is, where local Kurdish majorities live amid Arab and other minorities. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush ignored Saddam’s genocidal atrocities in 1987 and 1988. They did not want Iran to win the war Saddam had started. Some even tried to blame Tehran for Baghdad’s use of chemical weapons against Kurds and Iranians. Later, Kurds and Shiite Arabs were left to flee and fend for themselves after having been called to overthrow Saddam by Bush the elder, who somehow managed to forget he had done so. In the first Gulf War, the “realists”—Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and Colin Powell—ended the Baathist looting of Kuwait, but decided not to organize the replacement of Saddam’s regime. It was presidents from Turkey and France and a British prime minister, aided by Americans with a conscience, who obliged the formation of a safe haven for the Kurds. The Shiite Arabs were not so lucky. The U.S.-sponsored UN sanctions of Iraq followed (1991-2003), driven by Saddam’s refusal to comply fully with Security Council orders to destroy weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. The costs were passed to Iraq’s children and those outside Saddam’s inner circle. Kurdistan’s experiment in unofficial autonomy was devastated by triple sanctions—UN sanctions on Iraq, Saddam’s on Kurdistan, and pressure from neighbors that killed its agriculture.
Most observers complete this shameful list with the post–9/11 decision to remove Saddam’s regime. Reasonable historians should judge, however, that removing the genocidal Baathists was overdue. The younger Bush made up for his father’s mistake, though he did so for the wrong reasons. What was inexcusable was the grotesque mismanagement of regime-replacement: the unnecessary and arrogant occupation; the incompetence of American direct rule; the failure to inhibit the disorder that had to follow regime collapse; and the numerous errors of policy and imagination, both well-intentioned and malevolent, in the horrors and brutalities that have followed.
This record scarcely inspires confidence, but not all that is malevolent in Iraq is America’s responsibility. Moreover, some good has emerged from the Bush administration’s intervention, though that is insufficiently recognized.
I refer not to the surge or to the defeat of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia—which emerged and flourished after the U.S. intervention. The surge is somewhat misunderstood and overrated in importance; the local defeat of al Qaeda, though entirely welcome, owed most to that organization’s eventually self-destructive tactics. I refer instead to Iraq’s Constitution, which established its federal government, and to the Kurdistan region—neither of which was made in Washington, though it is sometimes implied otherwise.
The Constitution of 2005 and the successes of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) are the work of Arab and Kurdish politicians and voters. That the Bush administration let these institutions materialize does not mean that they are its creatures or are contaminated by its incompetence. To the contrary, the Constitution and the KRG are what must be protected in making the most honorable of the possible exits.
The responsible transfer of power must be completed with the federal government of Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. These institutions are the expressions of Iraqis’ and Kurds’ democratic will. Prioritizing their protection provides the right guidelines for the Obama administration to leave Iraq with integrity. The difficulty is that the Arab leadership in Baghdad is at odds with that of the KRG. America will have to back Kurdistan on some key matters and reassure the federal government of their merits. That is the only way a successful transfer of power can be accomplished.
The British invented modern Iraq by attempting to solder part of historic Kurdistan to al-Iraq al-Arabi. They broke their promise to create an autonomous Kurdistan and invented a deeply dysfunctional and divided polity. A Sunni Arabian Hashemite monarchy, despite intermittent good intentions, re-entrenched the Ottoman hierarchy of Sunni over Shia and a new racial and ethnic hierarchy of Arab over Kurd. The consequences were catastrophic, though often unregistered in the West, including in Western scholarship, which mostly read Iraq through the claims of its secularist Arabs, both regime loyalists and dissenters. Even today, many Sunni Arabs remain unrepentant racist supremacists toward Kurds and wish to re-establish their religious ascendancy over the Shiites.
The Constitution of 2005, ratified by four out of five voters in a UN-validated referendum, re-structured British-made Iraq as a voluntary union of its constituent peoples. It proclaims, on paper, a pluralist federation, maps the path toward different and flexible forms of decentralization, and creates multiple incentives for power sharing within a deliberately weak federal government. It remade Iraq as a parliamentary democracy—enabling its Shiite Arab majority to express itself as such, though subject to constitutional restraints, the most important of which lie in the formal strengthening of regions or provinces (governorates) at the expense of what until 2003 had been a series of despotisms in Baghdad.
The Bush administration, despite the mediating role of its ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, did not appreciate the Constitution of 2005. Like all U.S. administrations since 1980, it was fixated on having a strong Baghdad “to balance against Iran.” This foreign policy preference coincided with the centralist beliefs of the displaced Sunni Arabs and with those of the Sadrists, the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, and their allies among the Shiites. Since 2005, America’s diplomatic muscle has, ironically, been put behind the same constitutional preferences as those who killed American soldiers with frankly reactionary agendas, namely the not-so-ex-Baathists and the Sadrists. ‘The Bush administration, despite nominal good intentions, did not do much to strengthen either liberal or democratic forces in Iraq; it would be tragic if the Obama administration were to repeat the pattern.
The Constitution was made by the leading lights of SCIRI (now ISCI, the Iraqi Supreme Council of Islam) among the Shiite Arabs, together with the Kurdish leadership. These victims of Saddam agreed that a recentralized Iraq would be a threat to the liberties of Iraq’s nationalities, religious communities, and citizens—and to Iraq’s neighbors. They determined on a fresh start. They built into the Constitution the recognition of Kurdistan’s autonomy, including its right to have its own army, and granted any future regions the right to opt for the same powers as Kurdistan. The Constitution enables any existing provinces—barring Baghdad and Kirkuk—to join with other provinces to form larger regions. Baghdad may become a region in its own right. Provinces not organized in regions have extensive rights of self-government if they choose to exercise them. Special provisions (not yet implemented) enable Kirkuk and other disputed territories to unify with Kurdistan—after the expulsions, gerrymandering, and settler-infusion policies of the Baathists are undone.
The Constitution, in short, permits either a symmetrical federation, in which other regions are built with the same powers as Kurdistan, or an asymmetrical federation, in which the existing provinces of Arab-majority Iraq, by comparison with the KRG, choose to grant greater authority to the Baghdad government.
The Constitution remains a coherent vision of how to remake Iraq as a feasible democracy. It is also Iraq’s fundamental law, even if it is often disrespected. The Constitution is, however, in danger—a danger that may be aggravated by misreading Iraq’s 2009 provincial elections. No elections were held in Kurdistan and Kirkuk—approximately a fifth of the country. A common and facile evaluation claims that the elections in the fourteen Arab-majority provinces were won by centralists. It is true that ISCI, the champion of a Shiite-dominated southern super-region, was defeated—for now. It lost ground, however, mostly because of its poor performance in the provincial governments and because it was tarred as the Persian party. The fragmented Sunni and Shiite centralists who made advances have utterly rival visions of who should hold power in Baghdad. Moreover, each provincial government will want to exercise its powers as violence subsides and as the incompetence of Baghdad’s administration becomes more evident. (The federal oil ministry, for example, has failed to spend more than a fraction of its investment budget for three years in a row.)
In no province did any Arab party or list win 50 percent of the vote, and in only one did any list come close. This voting pattern will therefore lead to multiparty coalition governments in every Arab-majority province. Power sharing, both within provinces and within the federal government, is the unavoidable consequence of proportional representation and of political fragmentation among Arab Iraqis. It makes federalism viable and necessary; it is what Iraq needs, not a strongman backed by Washington.
The Obama administration must not follow the Bush administration, the Baker-Hamilton Report, the Brookings Institution, and other Washington think tanks in the misguided project of aiding the recentralization of Iraq. Some claim that recentralization is the settled will of Arab Iraqis. That is misleading. What Arabs currently reject is aggregating provinces into regions, like Kurdistan. They do not reject empowering their own provinces. And even if they were all full-blooded centralists, they cannot constitutionally weaken Kurdistan’s powers. It has an entrenched veto over amendments that might weaken its powers. Breaking the Constitution would send Kurdistan toward secession.
It will be far better for the Obama administration to organize an early exit before any Baghdad-based government becomes too strong. In the interim, it should render military and policing assistance to the provinces and to the Kurdistan region—which would be lawful—rather than to federal forces. The reason is simple: to consolidate a balance of power. The weaker a Baghdad government is, the more it must bargain with and accommodate Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and other minorities, and the more it must avoid naked partisanship on behalf of any community. The weaker it is, the greater the prospects for province-based federalism to strengthen itself in Arab Iraq.
This is not the current U.S. wisdom. Obama and Clinton are being encouraged to support the incumbent prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, on the grounds that he is a secular centralist, as well as the victor of the provincial elections. In fact, he is a deeply insecure but sectarian Shia, and in no Shiite-majority province (ten of Iraq’s eighteen) did his list win as much as 40 percent of the vote. He has dictatorial inclinations, but faces a federal Parliament in the year ahead in which numerous parties have incentives to remove him from power before he becomes a viable dictator, or before his party becomes Patronage Central.
Maliki has acted unconstitutionally, and with deliberate provocation, in blocking the implementation of constitutional mandates on natural resources, resolving the problem of Kirkuk and the disputed territories, and in trying to raise his own unauthorized militia among former Baathists and former Kurdish jash (levies from Kurdish tribes who co-operated with Saddam). He has nearly provoked fighting between the federal army and Kurdistan’s army in Khanaqin and seemed to want to do the same in Kirkuk. Maliki’s goals are transparent: he wants to create a strong central government, led by him.
For the United States to invest wholly in Maliki would be as foolhardy as investing with Bernard Madoff after the warning signals were evident. Obama should support Iraq’s Constitution and its federal, multiparty coalition government but not over-invest in a particular and uncertain person, especially one showing signs of dictatorial enthusiasm. His administration should encourage power sharing, not power-centralization, within the workings of the federal executive: Maliki heads a multiparty parliamentary coalition; he is not an executive president. Iraq has sufficient order to make federalism work. It does not need another dictatorship, Sunni or Shiite.
Once the Obama administration questions the idée fixe that Iraq must be recentralized, as Biden did in his capacity as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it will realize that it is much wiser to adopt a pro-Constitution policy, not just because it is legally and democratically better, but because it will enable a more judicious and just U.S. exit.
There is no point in building up a strong Baghdad military if that leads to a renewed war with Kurdistan. It would repeat the pattern of Iraqi history since 1920. Each successive Iraqi regime that has sought to consolidate its power has broken its previous commitments to Kurdistan’s autonomy and sought to conquer it. Ensuing Arab-Kurdish wars have then encouraged interventions by the neighboring powers. It is time to end this cycle.
Washington must therefore seek to resolve major Kurdish-Arab tensions before it leaves. That way Iraq’s internal territorial boundaries will be clarified, and the prospects of subsequent Turkish and Iranian interventions reduced. The means are clear—supporting the implementation of the Constitution’s Article 140, which, executed fairly, will facilitate Kirkuk’s and other disputed territories’ unifying with the KRG, in line with local majority opinion. As a quid pro quo, Washington should promote power-sharing provisions in the KRG’s Constitution for the Turkomen, Arabs, and Christians of Kirkuk city and offer to monitor minority rights protections that the Kurds have already promoted in good faith. Such a policy would also require supporting the formal transfer into the KRG of the Kurdish majority districts and sub-districts currently below its southern boundary. Such a policy is just: Saddam drew the existing borders, not elected Kurds or Arabs. It is required: the Kurdistan region’s boundary does not coincide with existing provincial boundaries, creating an administrative mess. The policy is constitutional. And it is democratic at the relevant level—the local one: Kurdistan’s lists appear to have triumphed throughout nearly all the disputed territories in the recent provincial elections. The policy will be stabilizing—provided the Turkomen are appropriately accommodated. A satisfied Kurdistan will be a champion of a federal Iraq. By contrast, a U.S. withdrawal before the just implementation of Article 140 will lead to war between factions in Baghdad and Kurdistan.
Kurdistan rejoined Iraq through the 2005 Constitution. It fears key provisions will not be implemented, and that Maliki and other Arab leaders are determined to build patronage and win votes by making Kurds the scapegoats for the Arabs’ civil war and America’s occupation. Kurds have observed a succession of U.S. ambassadors who have failed meaningfully to support Iraq’s 2005 Constitution. They expect further pressure from the Obama administration to appease Sunni Arab sentiments. But they have gone as far as they can to make Iraq work. The Kurdish leadership will go no further unless the status of Kirkuk and the disputed territories is resolved. They can be squeezed no more without losing the support of their public.
The naïve in Washington are celebrating the provincial electoral successes in Mosul and Basra of those who nominally support a strong centralized Iraq. But, these currently locally successful factions, at polar ends of urban Arab Iraq, do not have much in common—other than a determination for their respective co-religionists to dominate from Baghdad. The not-so-ex-Baathists are not going to be stable coalition partners with Maliki’s faction within Dawa, or with the Sadrists. What they promise is little more than competition over who will organize the first coup. They are jointly opposed to greater regionalization—as advocated by ISCI and the Kurds—but they cannot easily govern together, and they cannot change the Constitution radically without Kurdistan’s consent. Reversing Bush’s mistakes does not require the United States to embrace Baathist and Sadrist agendas.
After the United States exits, an Arab civil war may re-ignite, as well as Kurdish-Arab conflict. The Baathists’ and the jihadists’ response to the U.S. intervention was to promote deliberate societal collapse. They fomented a sectarian Arab civil war rather than accept a Shia-led democratic Iraq. Americans and Kurds did not loot Arab cities, organize suicide bombings against Shiite pilgrims, or provoke sectarian expulsions. It was militants from among Sunni Arabs, Baathists, and Islamists—encouraged by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s blindly repressive military strategy—who precipitated the bloodletting. The resulting violence has only just calmed down. It could be rekindled. The calmer environment exists because the jihadists and the Baathists lost. Sunni Arab leaders realized that they could not win the restoration they sought, no matter how extreme their tactics. Some decided it was better to make an alliance with the United States, through the Awakening Councils/Sons of Iraq, rather than go down to comprehensive defeat. General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, was able to take advantage of this opportunity. The surge stopped the Sunni Arabs from being utterly “cleansed” from Baghdad.
A key question for the Obama administration is how to facilitate the re-incorporation of Sunni Arabs into the new Iraq, but without doing so at the expense of either our Kurdish allies or the Shiites in federal and provincial governments. The answer lies only in the Constitution: encouraging Sunni Arabs to take control of the provinces in which they are now formal electoral majorities and of their own security, through the development of provincial policing. That is the right message to take from recent elections. This policy need not be provocative so long as the Sunni Arabs’ boundary disputes with Kurdistan are resolved. If they are, then Sunni Arabs will be free to govern themselves without a significant Kurdish presence in their provinces. The answer to Sunni Arab disaffection does not lie in expanding federal military forces and trying to integrate large numbers of former insurgents—therein lies a recipe for a coup.
A responsible exit requires concentrated diplomacy to deter malign interventions. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will reduce Iran’s interests in destabilizing the new Iraq, provided the United States does not engage in a new bout of hubris and directly aim at regime change in Tehran (what John Bolton and the last stranded platoons of the Bush administration want). Indeed, pursuing détente with Iran and a new policy with Turkey are both independently appropriate. They will be easier and more cost effective than the false project of rebuilding a strong Baghdad government.
If U.S. policy is rethought in favor of détente with Iran, then balancing Baghdad against Tehran can be abandoned as an overriding U.S. goal. In April 2003, Iran was ready to have a grand bargain with the United States over Iraq, in return for being removed from the so-called axis of evil. Skeptics will find the details in Trita Parsi’s Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007, especially Appendices A-C). The offer was rejected by the Bush administration, then at the height of its arrogance. Tehran’s fear that its regime would be next on Washington’s kill list led it to play havoc with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, to restart its nuclear program, and to cause other major difficulties for the United States in the Middle East.
Unwinding Bush’s errors with Iran is still feasible. Détente offers the only plausible way simultaneously to facilitate nuclear disarmament in the region, to control the negative consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq, and to aid Iran’s reformers without interfering in Tehran’s domestic politics. Nothing here is easy, but it can be done.
The re-engineering of U.S. policy toward Turkey is also necessary if we are to leave Iraq responsibly. Turkey fears an independent Kurdistan. But a secure KRG within a federal Iraq will not be an independent Kurdistan; rather, it will be a satisfied, prosperous secular region, a buffer between Turkey and hard-line Islamists. Turkey wants the KRG’s cooperation with respect to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its adjunct Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK). It will get this, but only if it pays the appropriate price: fully recognizing the KRG and Iraq’s Constitution, and avoiding provocations in Kirkuk.
In the past, U.S. administrations have supported Turkey’s military—as self-defined guardians of the Enlightenment in former Ottoman lands. Turkish generals fear democracy because it means the election of soft Islamists and Kurds. Realists in the Obama administration will prefer Turkish generals. They will be at odds with those who want to support Turkey’s democratic promise and who want to encourage its journey into Europe. It is the largest sovereign Muslim majority state in the Middle East that allows genuine democratic electoral competition, although it is deeply flawed in its respect for Kurdish and Alawi freedom and in the constraints it puts on public debate. It would be utterly perverse for Obama to abandon a liberalizing and pro-democratic orientation toward Turkey. U.S. policy should be firm—seeking Turkey’s respect for the sovereignty of Iraq and of its Constitution, which recognizes the KRG. It should also be wise—supporting Turkey’s deepening democratization at the expense of its military and, if necessary, recognizing Turkey’s existing border through a treaty. If the Obama administration mismanages its exit from Iraq, it could be faced with new military dictators in both Ankara and Baghdad. Sacrificing Iraq’s Kurds is not the way to eliminate that scenario.
The federal government remains, for now, in the hands of a multiparty coalition, in which the Kurds, ISCI, and others want to remove Maliki from the premiership if they can. The Kurds, with good reason, fear he wishes to establish a dictatorship and to block their gains in order to build clients among traditional Arab nationalists. ISCI wants to recover lost ground and to prevent Dawa from permanently gaining at its expense. The Kurds and ISCI have had a small Sunni partner, in the Iraqi Islamic Party, that did better than expected in the provincial elections, but its trajectory is uncertain.
Maliki presents himself as a source of stability, above faction. He is anything but. He stays in power through buying off a combustible combination of Baathists, Sunni tribal leaders, and Sadrists, and by having U.S. backing. He has benefitted from an exhausted Arab public’s urgent thirst for order, but in no province commands a majority, and his next steps promise disorder.
Before the next federal elections, Maliki will want American support to prevent his removal by the Kurds and ISCI (who still have far larger numbers in the Baghdad federal legislature than in the provinces). The Sunni Arabs will want the Americans to integrate the entirety of the Awakening Councils into the federal forces, which would represent the restoration of Sunni predominance within the army. That would mean a future of attempted coups. The Sadrists, recovering from recent wounds, want a centralized Iraq, at the expense of the Kurds (loud voice), and at the expense of the Sunni Arabs (quiet voice). The United States is therefore set to be wooed by the Arab factions most hostile to the new Constitution, those most likely to attempt coups, and those most likely to re-start civil wars.
The Obama administration should realize that the Kurdish parties, ISCI, the Iraqi Islamic Party, and some sections of Dawa are those most likely to consolidate the new Iraq as a pluralist federation. It should use its soft power to facilitate them. The Bush administration blocked Kurdistan’s lawful use of Article 112 to develop its natural resources. Ambassador Ryan Crocker was the latest in a series of U.S. emissaries to deter major U.S. oil and gas companies from investing in Kurdistan. This policy was not only against Iraq’s Constitution, it also prevented Kurdistan from aiding Iraq’s economic recovery. The Bush administration then hypocritically stood aside and insisted that the implementation of Article 140 on boundaries was a purely internal matter. In so doing, it blocked the democratic resolution of territorial boundaries, which is essential if Iraq is to be stable after America’s departure. Switching both policies around would be constitutionally correct and would pay political dividends. The United States should also offer its good offices to aid the committees currently trying to resolve disputes between Baghdad and the KRG—on boundaries, natural resources, budgetary allocations, and security. And it should encourage the provincialization of security, to stabilize Sunni Arab majority provinces. But settling the internal boundaries is crucial; without that, no responsible exit is possible.
If the Obama administration does none of these things, it will not be able to wash its hands of the blood that will flow as a result of a reckless exit. An exit designed by those who call themselves realists would return to power—not only in Baghdad, but also in Ankara and Tehran—those who most oppose everything that Obama stands for—liberal, democratic, tolerant, and multiracial pluralism.
This essay will be appearing in a forthcoming Dissent/Penn Press collection edited by Michael Walzer and Nicolaus Mills, Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq. The comes out in September. For more information, click here.
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