World

One of the countless mistakes made in the planning and execution of the Iraq war was the baffling Pollyannaism of the planners. It’s one thing to put an optimistic face forward, but an entirely different thing to be legitimately surprised when things don’t work out in the way you intended. I would have thought that planning for worst-case scenarios is standard operating procedure for military operations, but Rumsfeld and his underlings seemed to be simply stuck when things went wrong.

Deep into the mess, it’s still worth asking what is the worst-case scenario for Iraq, and I don’t see many people making the effort. I’m certainly no expert, but even I can see a clear path to much worse outcomes than most people seem to be contemplating. Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy has laid out a useful categorization of the possibilities, on which Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber offers useful commentary:

1. The U.S. beats back the insurgency and democracy flowers in Iraq (call this the “optimistic stay” scenario),
2. The U.S. digs in its heels, spends years fighting the insurgency, loses lots of troops, and years later withdraws, leading to a bloody and disastrous civil war (the “pessimistic stay” scenario);
3. The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out relatively soon, and things in Iraq are about as best as you could hope for, perhaps leading to a decent amount of democracy (optimistic leave), and
4. The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out soon, and plunges Iraq into a bloody and disastrous civil war with the bad guys assuming control eventually (pessimistic leave).

I can be more pessimistic than that! The hints are right there in the attempts by some Shia clerics to carve out some autonomy for Shiites in the oil-rich southern provinces of the country. The proposal, which would have isolated the Sunni minority in the relatively poor central regions between Kurdish and Shia territories, seems to have been defeated as far as the Iraqi constitution is concerned. But things are far from settled, and it raises the possibility that the civil war will ultimately result in partition of the country.

Iraq was one of those ethnically heterogeneous nations that were awkwardly pieced together in the process of colonialization and its aftermath. It’s very common for such states to dissolve when the bonds are loosened.

Iraq, forged by the British from the war-torn scrap of the collapsed Ottoman empire, survived as a single state only because of the iron fists of monarchs and, in more recent decades, former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Despite that, there is a fear that its disintegration could trigger unpredictable consequences for all of its uneasy neighbours — Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. Some critics now say that the policy pledge of trying to keep Iraq whole was always doomed. “Iraq is the last, multiethnic state, left over from the First World War,” said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador with experience in both the Balkans and Iraq.

“Democracy killed the Soviet Union, it killed Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and it will kill Iraq,” he said in an interview from Baghdad.

“A managed breakup is not easy, but it will be less violent than a forced and unhappy union,” said Mr. Galbraith, now a senior diplomatic fellow at the Washington-based Center for Arms Control.

Maybe it will be less violent; but the opposite is certainly conceivable. Imagine that the Kurds and the Shiites really carve out separate countries for themselves. The Shia region will naturally ally with Iran, as has already been happening. The existence of a sovereign Kurdish state will be unacceptable to leaders in Turkey, who worry that their own Kurdish minority will push to secede. Meanwhile the small Sunni minority will be left without significant oil wealth, but with a memory of ruling the country for decades.

It’s not hard to imagine disaster: a conflict between one or the other of these remnant states spreading to their natural allies in the region. Iran and the former Iraq have a long history of bloody warfare; it’s not hard to envision a conflict between the Shiites and Sunnis, with Iran jumping in on the Shiite side. The Sunnis have allies throughout the Arab world, any one of which might come to their aid — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria. Turkey could easily see the chaos as a good excuse to subdue the Kurds, opening up a regional conflagration. Saddam already established the precedent of lobbying missiles at Israel when things look grim; various of the states involved could get a similar idea. Unlike the first Gulf War, in which the U.S. was trying to hold together a fragile coalition of regional allies, the Israelis would have little motivation for sitting quietly without retaliating (nor should they). It would be, to put it mildly, a mess.

To be clear, I don’t think such a scenario is at all likely; but I don’t think it’s inconceivable, either. And it should be our job to contemplate the worst possible outcomes of unstable situations like we find ourselves in right now. This is why, although I’ve always been anti-war, and certainly against the establishment of permanent U.S. bases (one of the many unspoken agendas of the war), I’ve never been in favor of setting a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops, an idea that seems to be gaining currency among Democrats. I’m of the Colin Powell “you break it, you bought it” school, and we have certainly broken it. Right now, how long we stay in Iraq should largely be up to the judgement of the Iraqis themselves, acting as a sovereign nation; so long as our troops are serving a useful purpose in helping the country stay together and move towards peace, it’s our obligation to stick it out.

Update: At Obsidian Wings, hilzoy has a discussion of Iraqi militias that won’t make anyone feel more optimistic.