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Iraq
Everything in Iraq today was predictable
The following article was first published in The Republic October 17, 2002, six months before the US first invaded Iraq
by Kevin Potvin
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Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has indicated Canada would join in a US-led assault on Iraq, so long as the United Nations Security Council gives the green light. Therefore, the same difficult questions posed to the White House can legitimately be posed to the Prime Minister’s office.
There are two basic questions: What sort of reconstruction is contemplated for a post-war Iraq? And what contingencies are being planned should the war widen to other parts of the region?
On these questions, the Prime Minister has had nothing to say. The UN Security Council is equally silent—which is the main reason Russia and France, two of the five members, are generally opposed to upsetting the relative stability of Iraq. The White House has lately spoken of an American military government of occupation that would remain in Baghdad until an indigenous democratic movement takes seed.
What makes Iraq difficult to govern is that it is an artificial country comprised mostly of three roughly equally sized ethnic groups with deep and bitter resentments between them: the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds. The Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein is Sunni, and only through iron-fisted repression has the regime managed frequent Kurdish and Shiite rebellions stretching back decades.
Too much independence
It is difficult to imagine Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni together operating Iraq in some sort of confederacy, since historically the Shiites and Kurds have nurtured ambitions for independent countries, and have spilt much blood toward that aim. It is equally difficult to imagine any one of the three ethnic groups being peacefully handed the reigns by an American occupation force to the exclusion of the other two. Lengthy bloody revolts among any two of the three groups can well be expected.
In its current configuration, therefore, only a massively repressive regime orchestrated by either the Sunnis or the Americans is possible if Iraq is to have a government at all. However, it is a repressive Sunni regime whose removal is the point of any war on Iraq, and the Americans—like the Kurds and the Shiites—do not aspire to rule the whole country, nor would they be able to. The only solution then would be the dismemberment of Iraq into its three constituent parts.
However, Turkey and Syria are anxious about the creation of a Kurdistan, since the Kurds aspire to a country encompassing parts of Turkey and Syria as well as Iraq. Now that Turkey has been soundly rebuffed for even considering it might be invited to join the European Union, that country’s cooperation with any Kurdistan plan popular among European and American leaders will be greatly lessened. Syria can be counted on to offer all the resistance to a Kurdistan it can muster as well.
Civil war
Furthermore, dismembering Iraq along ethnic lines will incur a great deal of ethnic cleansing and long marches of refugees caught in the wrong area. The chances for a humanitarian catastrophe, not to mention years of civil war, are high indeed.
Furthermore, Shiites rule Iran, and Sunnis rule most of the Arab states, so any civil war in Iraq is likely to be long drawn out as these client states fuel their proxies in any Iraqi civil war. What is more, Iraq sits atop oil reserves perhaps equal in volume to Saudi Arabia’s, offering up a prize to the winner large enough to make any level of fighting worth all combatants’ efforts.
The likely scenario following a US assault on the government of Iraq is none of the above, and at the same time, something from each. The collapse of Iraq’s Ba’athist regime will first bring out Kurds and Shiites in celebration. Then there’ll likely be attacks on Sunnis, Sunni retributions, and then increasing repression from the Americans. The US will find itself the sworn enemies of not just two of the ethnic groups in Iraq it hopes to rule, like the Ba’athist regime, but all three groups, with no friendly population backing them at all. The situation will become prohibitively expensive and complicated for the US, until the Americans choose to simply leave, and Iraq will descend into a horribly chaotic nightmare. Jean Chrétien has ensured Canada will play the role of co-conspirator in this crime.
The other question is even more unsettling. What contingencies are being planned in Ottawa should the war widen to other parts of the region? Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser degree, Iran, are all ruled by unpopular dictatorships. In all three cases, violent overthrow of the national government is a real and daily possibility, all the more so if these countries become involved against one another in any Iraqi civil war.
Islamist Riyadh
Powerful Islamist forces exist in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, making fanatic Islamist regimes in Cairo and Riyadh a possible outcome, if any group emerges to govern these countries at all. Because oil exists in vast quantities in these countries, and because the government armories are well-stocked, like Iraq, the prize is so great, that no stable government is likely to emerge, and more neighbour states will likely become interested in fueling protracted civil wars in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt as well.
As different factions of Muslims fall into all-out war stretching across the whole region, other large Muslim-populated states, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, won’t be able to avoid becoming involved. As well, sizable Muslim populations in the Philippines, elsewhere in Asia and Africa, and even in Europe and North America, will be drawn into the various complicated life-and-death struggles playing out in the Middle East.
Without an effective plan by the White House to address the possibility of war in Iraq widening out across the region in this fashion, the war is likely to come directly home to European and North American cities. Ottawa has shown it has considered the question about the neighbourhood surrounding Iraq no more than it has given any thought to the question inside Iraq.
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