PRESIDENT Bush has been hop-scotching around the country over the past weeks to regain the public's support for the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, he still sounds much like a broken record because the underlying policy, which the American public now rejects, remains the same. In fact, beyond haphazardly fighting insurgents, many would say that Bush has no policy at all for proactively taking control of Iraq.
Having now fought for more than three years, spent more than $200 billion and lost more than 2,300 American lives, it is time for us to win the war. In a country where terrorists run amok, the Democrats' strategy of "cut and run" simply won't work. In a region where dangerous regimes would do us harm, Americans will accept nothing less than outright victory. To that end, we must have a plan that is at once powerful, pragmatic and politically palatable. In short, we must have a plan for partition.
In the weeks leading up to the third anniversary of their liberation from Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship, Iraqis celebrated by brutalizing each other. Most notably, in February, Sunni Muslim bombers destroyed one of the most sacred shrines for Shiites. In the wake of that attack, more than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in sectarian fighting, according to the Associated Press. That, however, was only the most visible manifestation of the dozens of sectarian attacks each week, which have come to be ignored as background noise.
Still, when one looks at the discrete incidents, the extent of Iraqis' sectarian savagery becomes evident. For example, last Monday The Washington Post reported on a Sunni Iraqi doctor who gave Shiite police officers and soldiers lethal injections under the guise of treating them.
The Iraqi state will not fail because Iraqis reject the presence of American troops; it will fail because Iraqis reject the presence of one another. Some would say that it has already failed. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi declared two weeks ago that the country was presently in a state of civil war. Americans may not have reached the same conclusion just yet, but a Pew Research poll last month found that 66 percent of Americans believe Iraq is headed that way.
The administration's many critics, who argue that Western notions of democracy cannot be imposed on foreign cultures, are only half right. The reason it will not work in those countries is because democracy is premised on the public's willingness to accept the values of pluralism and tolerance. Without this premise, the only way to hold a multiethnic society together is by torture, force and oppression, which was the way Saddam succeeded in Iraq where we have not.
Unfortunately, pluralism is a relatively recent phenomenon for humanity and even societies such as ours that have embraced this value in principle still have trouble in practice. As for the rest of the world, most of it continues to live in the Stone Age, which values tribal warfare, identity politics and groupthink, rather than rational behavior and respect for one another as individuals.
As much as we would like to force Iraqis to be free from their atavistic attitudes, there's only so much we can do to lift them out of their state of nature. At some point, we must accept the reality that we can only mitigate this poison by partitioning Iraqis the way parents physically separate adolescent siblings from fighting.
To that end, the present parliamentary government in Iraq, which has yet to start working because of sectarian strife, should be reconfigured with this in confederation. That confederation should in turn consist of three semi-autonomous zones. These regions are already largely divided along sectarian and ethnic lines, with Kurds to the north, Sunnis in the middle and Shiites to the south.
The only thing that prevented Iraq from splitting up to begin with is the oil wealth, which is concentrated in the south, and which the Kurds and Sunnis want a piece of. Thus, any confederation must ensure that Shiites share their oil proceeds equitably. Think of it as buying peace with their Sunni antagonists.
Once partition is implemented, the sectarian violence should subside and Iraq can start functioning as a country once again, instead of serving as an incubator for terrorist activity. American troops can then come home honorably with the knowledge that they have achieved victory over a brutal autocracy and a dangerous anarchy, both of which, if left unattended, would have gravely threatened our national security.
Eric Wang's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.
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