Cure Worse Than Disease
Historically, every Middle East state went through periods of unity as part of empire, and through periods of atomism and degradation, usually after another great conqueror’s invasion.
In Iraqi case, a ‘separatist’ would say that the merger of Ottoman provinces of Baghdad and Basra with later annexation of Kurdish Mosul was an artificial construction invented by British colonizers. Moreover, Basra was an ‘extraordinary item’ even in the 8th-century Abbasid Caliphate. In his turn, a ‘centralist’ would remind that the Tigris and Euphrates interfluves area made up one whole region and even a cradleland of civilization already four thousand years ago.
Anyway, Eastern states were never built according to religious or ethnic homogeneity principles. A strong ruler secured the unity by means of an adequate ratio of ‘sticks and carrots’, maneuvering among clans like Afghanistan’s rulers, or suppressing the disobedient ones by force like many other Eastern autocrats. Meanwhile, the attempts to artificially homogenize the population more often led to negative results.
It became evident long ago that the attempts to rudely democratize Eastern societies give, at best, an arithmetic advantage in power to the strongest community. At best. Meanwhile, the Iraqi case is the worst. We deal with an old tradition of physically removing the opponents, with Shiite’s radicalism imported from Iran, with Sunnis used to a privileged role, and, at last, with permanently offended Kurdish minority.
Kurdistan’s autonomy in Baasist Iraq in the 1970s began as fiction and ended as a tragedy of chemical genocide. Yet, the autonomy à l'américaine will also begin as fiction, the fiction of democratic and federative Iraq, and will probably end with separation of Kurdish provinces. It will be a de facto, if not de jure, separation, with a drastic growth of Kurdish separatism in Turkey and Iran, and Kurdish insurgency in Syria, at the same time. Shiites and Sunnis will remain mixed in different proportions in the remaining provinces. Even their common suspicion towards Kurds will not reconcile them.
Why don’t Americans understand it? First, they do not have the knowledge of local reality and the skill of ‘dividing and ruling’ like their British allies. To acquire these qualities, the U.S. would need to have been a colonial empire for at least two centuries. Second, and the main, is that the ‘Eastern policy’ crisis of the Bush administration went so far that it is ready to be friends with anyone, even with under-finished-off Talibs in Afghanistan, or with Kurds, just to save the face and minimize losses.
Alas, the separatist remedy for the East (and not only the East) is sometimes worse than the disease. Federative Iraq is halfway towards collapse and inevitable chaos. As we see, the attempts to unite Iraq are not working. So, what if it is eventually necessary to call a new Saddam?
Boris Makarenko, first deputy director general of the Political Technologies Center
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 09, 2007
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