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10/18/2005:

"The 'carve-up of Iraq'"

...In this constitution, Iraqi Kurds don't get the state that 98% of them want, according to a recent referendum, but they do get gains - vast legislative powers, control of their own militia and authority over discoveries of oil - which in effect consecrate the quasi-independence they have enjoyed since western "humanitarian" intervention on their behalf in the 1991 Gulf war and which Kurds regard as a way station towards the real thing. The Iraqi republic is to be "independent, sovereign, federal, democratic and parliamentary"; but one thing, explicitly, it is no longer, is "Arab". For that, says its Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, would be to deny the right of Kurdish citizens to look to membership of a greater Kurdish nation, just as its Arab citizens look to the greater Arab one. Yet more shocking, and potentially rending, to Sunni Arabs everywhere, than this ethnic separatism is the new, intra-Arab, sectarian one. Not only have the Shia established political ascendancy in a single Arab country for the first time in centuries but they are doing so, like the Kurds, in the context of a constitutionally prescribed autonomy which, if Shia leaders such as Abdul Aziz Hakim mean what they say, will incorporate central and southern Iraq, more than half the country's population and the bulk of its natural assets.

The adoption of a federal formula is seen by the Arab world not as a remedy for Iraq's inherent divisiveness, but, in conditions of rising intercommunal tensions and violence, as a stimulus to it. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the veteran Saudi foreign minister and voice of the Sunni Arab establishment, told Americans that it is "part of a dynamic pushing the Iraqi people away from each other. If you allow for this - for a civil war to happen between Shias and Sunnis - Iraq is finished forever. It will be dismembered." What makes it more alarming is that, unlike the Kurds, Iraqi Shias, however ambivalently they feel about it, enjoy the strong support of a powerful neighbour. Now, under its new president, in something of a neo-Khomeinist revivalist mode, Iran is clearly accumulating all the Shia-based geopolitical assets it can, from Iraq to south Lebanon, in preparation for the grand showdown that threatens between it and the US.

Arabs have long warned of the "Lebanonisation" of Iraq, automatically mindful of the fact that virtually every western-created state in the eastern Arab world contains the latent ethnic or sectarian tensions that produced that archetype of Arab civil war. But whereas, in concert with the US, the Arabs finally managed to put out the Lebanese fire before it spread, their prospects of achieving the same amid the violence in Iraq are slight indeed. The inter-Arab state system - and its chief institution, the Arab League - has long been incapable of concerted action against what, like Iraq, are perceived as threats to the Arab "nation". Now the system itself is threatened by the growth of non-state activities, the cross-border traffic in extreme Islamist ideology - along with the jihadists and suicide bombers who act on it - or ethnic and sectarian solidarities of the kind that threaten to tear Iraq apart.
guardian.co.uk