The Center Cannot Hold
A former U.S. ambassador argues that we must split Iraq into three pieces or face even more bloodshed.

Reviewed by David Ignatius
Sunday, August 6, 2006

THE END OF IRAQ

How American Incompetence Created a War Without End

By Peter W. Galbraith

Simon & Schuster. 260 pp. $26

Last year I asked a retired Israeli intelligence officer what he thought about the American struggle to create a new Iraq. "Forget it," he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Iraq is not a real country. Let it dissolve into its parts."

That's pretty much the prescription of Peter W. Galbraith in his elegiac new book, The End of Iraq. While Bush administration officials warn of the dangers of giving up on a united Iraq, Galbraith argues that the worst has already happened: The United States has failed to create a stable post-Saddam Hussein government; a bloody civil war is already raging; and the longer the United States tries to maintain the fiction that the Iraqi killing ground is a viable nation, the more people will get killed. Better that Iraq break into its constituent pieces -- an independent Kurdistan in the north, an Iranian-dominated Shiastan in the south, a Sunnistan in the northwest.

"There is no good solution to the mess in Iraq," Galbraith writes. "The country has broken up and is in the throes of civil war. The United States cannot put the country back together again and it cannot stop the civil war. If it scales back its ambitions, it can help stabilize parts of the country and contain the civil war. But the U.S. needs to do so quickly."

A similar argument for letting Iraq divide along its natural fault lines has been made by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the leading Democratic Party voice on foreign policy, and Leslie Gelb, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. And it has become an urgent question for the Bush administration as the situation on the ground in Iraq continues to deteriorate. By Galbraith's account, "staying the course" in Iraq won't just waste American lives and money; it will prevent Iraqis from reaching their own form of stability once the American enterprise collapses, as it inevitably will. "Looking at Iraq's dismal eighty-year history," he writes, "it should be apparent that it is the effort to hold Iraq together that has been destabilizing. Pursuit of a coerced unity has led to endless violence, repression, dictatorship, and genocide."

If partition were an easy process of tearing along neatly perforated lines, it would be hard to argue with the Galbraith-Biden-Gelb proposition. But the reality is that the old Iraq was a genuinely heterogeneous society, with Sunnis and Shiites sharing neighborhoods, inter-marrying, even being members of the same tribes. Saddam Hussein's regime was built on the idea of "Arabism," a shared identity that transcended religious and ethnic fault lines -- by force, if necessary. Still, this ideology was remarkably successful. It's common now for analysts like Galbraith -- who amassed a grim expertise on ethnic bloodshed as the first U.S. ambassador to Croatia -- to say that this Iraqi Arab identity was fused at the point of a gun, but that misses the yearning for modernism and secular society that animated the educated middle class in the old Iraq. The only group that always remained outside this national consensus, in my experience, was the Kurds.

The de facto partition of Iraq has already begun, and we can see what a brutal process it is -- especially around Baghdad, the epicenter of sectarian violence. Sunni neighborhoods are being cleansed of Shiites and vice versa; death squads roam the streets and throw up checkpoints; the squads kidnap, torture and kill those from the "other" sect. Looking at Iraq's ravaged capital, whose security situation even President Bush called "terrible" in late July, it's hard to imagine that things could get worse. But they almost certainly would the moment it became clear that the United States had given up on a unified Iraq. That would unleash a violent separation of populations and wholesale killing until Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish militias established what they considered defensible boundaries. In this initial separation, tens of thousands could be killed. (The Indian subcontinent still shudders from the trauma of the India-Pakistan partition almost 60 years ago.) Once stable ethnic cantons were established, the killing would diminish but not stop. In Lebanon, the separation phase was followed by 16 years of civil war that included sniping and artillery duels across the "green lines" that separated the cantons.

If things are as bad as Galbraith argues, it's possible that poor, ragged Lebanon may be Iraq's best model. Through all the years of its miserable 1975-90 civil war, Lebanon retained a president, a prime minister, a parliament, a national army. These governing institutions didn't do much; real power had devolved to the militias and to the regional powers -- Israel and Syria -- that had occupied Lebanon. But the idea of a Lebanese nation survived, as has been evident in the way its population has rallied around its tattered flag during recent weeks.

A partitioned Iraq, too, would risk being carved up by the regional powers, with Iran enfolding the Shiites in its wings, Turkey setting brutal red lines for the Kurds lest they try to wrest away a chunk of its own turf, and the Syrians and Jordanians sharing the thankless task of trying to maintain order among the Sunnis. Not an appealing prospect.

Despite its troubling prescription, Galbraith's book is important because, as much as any American, he has lived the Iraq tragedy up close and personal. From the beginning, he focused his attention on the plight of the Kurds, becoming a kind of adviser and emissary of the Kurdish leader (and now Iraqi president) Jalal Talabani. This ardent identification with the Kurdish cause has simplified Galbraith's choices in analyzing the Iraq conundrum: It's clearly good for the Kurds to achieve their historic dream of an independent homeland, but whether this separation is better for other Iraqis -- and for the interests of the United States and its allies -- is a much harder question.

Galbraith's fascination with Iraq began in 1984, when he traveled to Baghdad as a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had the gumption to press then-Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz about whether Iraq was using poison gas in its war against Iran, and he has been asking good, contrarian questions ever since. Galbraith's passion for the Kurds dates back to 1987, when he traveled to Sulaymaniyah and stumbled upon what he later realized was a genocidal Iraqi campaign, code-named the Anfal, that was meant to break Kurdish political and cultural life. He returned again and again, becoming close to Talabani, Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and other key figures in the story.

Galbraith sketches some reasons for the American failure in Iraq, such as inadequate planning for postwar Iraq, lack of understanding of the players and their interests, and ongoing policy squabbles in Washington. But such familiar assessments are not the real contribution of his short book, part-memoir, part-policy treatise. Other books, published and on the way, are doing that big analytical task better. The value of Galbraith's account is that it's rooted in his personal experience -- why he loathed Saddam Hussein's regime, why he came to champion the Kurdish cause, how he watched as America turned a war of liberation into a bungled occupation.

I wished for a little more self-criticism -- an appreciation that the Kurds, for all their tragic history, have been part of the problem in post-liberation Iraq, too, by pushing their own agenda for greater self-rule so hard. And I found a bit too easy Galbraith's transition from enthusiast for toppling the old Baathist tyranny to critic of the postwar occupation. The people who got it wrong sometimes seem to include everyone but Galbraith. But those criticisms don't alter my admiration for the book or its author.

So what of the fundamental question he raises? Is the Iraq venture doomed? Are we wasting American and Iraqi lives pursuing a vision of a new, unitary Iraq that has no connection with reality? Should we conclude, as Galbraith does, that Iraq itself is finished? We're all shaped by our personal experiences and contacts in weighing questions like this. When I put the matter to some of the Iraqis I have met in the 26 years since I first visited that country, they warned that, bad as things are now, they would be even worse if America pulled out suddenly. In the end, accepting partition may amount to accepting reality -- but that's a measure of just how bad things have gotten in Iraq. We made the mistake of rushing into Iraq without thinking carefully enough about the consequences of our actions. We should not make the same mistake in rushing out.

David Ignatius is a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post and the co-moderator of PostGlobal, an online forum hosted by washingtonpost.com.