THE CURRENT borders of Iraq were created at the end of World War I as a League of Nations mandate to be controlled by the United Kingdom. Prior to World War I, the three provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra had never been considered as one nation. More than 80 years later, Iraq has still not been able to form any sort of national identity and sectarian violence across Iraq has been particularly rampant between Sunni and Shi'i factions in recent weeks.
The recent discovery of mass graves in the northern city of Mosul suggest that massive bloodshed lies ahead if something drastic is not done. Given this imperative, it is time for the United States to think seriously about splitting Iraq into separate nations along ethnic lines. The alternative may be catastrophic.
Some background: Iraq's political history, rife with civil war, internal slaughter and brutal dictatorships, suggests its failure to build a cohesive identity. Iraq's first ruler, King Faisal, remarked in 1931 that his subjects were "connected by no common tie" and "perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever." The overthrow of the monarchy in 1958 resulted in a succession of military coups, leading to the emergence of Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s. During this entire period, Iraq was engaged in a civil war with its Kurdish population in the north, who insisted on sovereignty.
Saddam Hussein, as is well-known, ruled the nation with an iron fist, and put down rebellion with military force. We all know of Saddam's brutal massacres of his Kurdish and Shi'i subjects and his bloody means of silencing dissidents.
But history teaches us also that democracy can often be a profoundly destabilizing force. Under democracy the people rule. But this begs the question: Who are the Iraqi people? With the internal divisions in Iraq, ethnically and religiously, between the Kurdish, Shi'i, and Sunni populations, the answer has been: there is no Iraqi people. People in Iraq are turning to religious and ethnic identities instead of national identities.
It is trendy in academia today to deny that ethnicity exists, to claim that it is a construct, that it is permeable, that it can be easily overcome. History teaches us, however, that this is untrue. Almost everyone, even in the United States, has an ethnic or religious identity which they value. These ethnic and religious identities have interfered with attempts to create multicultural democracies across the globe.
The closest parallel to what is occurring now in Iraq is the case of Yugoslavia, also a multiethnic country which attempted to make the transition from rule by a military thug, Tito, to existence as a democracy. Without the stabilizing influence provided by a dictator, democracy led to ethnic division in Yugoslavia, which resulted in a prolonged civil war.
Despite warning signs of an impending war during the early 1990s, the United States attempted to keep Yugoslavia together. But the task proved impossible, and Yugoslavia only attained peace when its borders were split on ethnic lines. Many other nations have been forced to split on ethnic lines in order to establish democratic governance structures, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Malaysia and Singapore and Israel and Palestine are only a few examples. Splitting into nations with clear ethnic majorities ensures some degree of political stability and provides a reprieve from pitched battles for ethnic control.
I am not saying that the task of creating a democratic Iraq under the current borders is impossible. It is, however, quite daunting, and history provides little hope. The Kurdish minority in Iraq insists on maintaining its own autonomous governance structures. While there is hope for compromise between politicians, people are dying in the street as a result of ethnic violence. In the meantime, U.S. troops are being put in a difficult situation, as their presence in Iraq is essential for the time being.
Nor would the process of splitting Iraq be entirely smooth. Many regions within Iraq contain several ethnic communities; resources are spread differentially throughout the country. Any splitting of the nation would involve transfers of minority populations. I have no devastating riposte for those who would point out these costs. All that may be said is that this process has been carried out in the past, perhaps most recently with Israel and Palestine, and that splitting the nation offers the only realistic solution to the problem of ethnic violence. We cannot simply ask the Iraqis to give up their ethnicity and religion; attempts to build the nation by force exact too high a moral toll.
If we do not act quickly, we risk responsibility for a human and moral calamity, involving both American and Iraqi lives, as the contry potentially descends into a prolonged civil war.
Noah Peters' column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at npeters@cavalierdaily.com.
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