Partitioning Iraq: No starter

A majority of Americans of all walks of life, as opinion polls clearly indicate, are counting the days and ways that they can extricate their country from the expanding Iraqi quagmire where some 2,400 US troops have lost their lives and at least 30,000 Iraqis perished since the US-led occupation.

The latest suggestion for a near-total pullout some time in 2008 has come from an influential American, Delaware Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr, a presidential aspirant and the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

His timing, on May Day, came three years to the day after President George W. Bush stood on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln beneath a banner saying, "Mission Accomplished". He then unabashedly declared, a remark that he probably regrets because he is often taunted about it, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

Senator Biden's proposal, spelled out in an Op-Ed column and co-authored by Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Affairs in New York and a former Times staffer, coincided with another seemingly uplifting statement by the American president.

The president chose to give a public welcome to his two emissaries to Baghdad, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, after a meeting with Iraqi prime minister-designate Jawad Al Maliki, an unnecessary pat on the back since this gesture could tarnish the Iraqi leader's image.

"A new Iraqi government represents a strategic opportunity for America and the whole world for that matter," Bush said. "We believe this is a turning point for the Iraqi citizens, and it's a new chapter in our partnership."

Political stalemate

But Al Maliki, whose nomination to parliament two weeks ago ended four months of political stalemate, has yet to find his way out of the complex business of naming an all-representative cabinet that can stop the internecine violence among Iraq's feuding ethnic and sectarian groups, mainly Arab Shiites and Sunnis, and Kurds.

Biden, an articulate speaker who chooses his sentences very carefully, minced no words. His motivation for the column had this explanation: "It is increasingly clear that President Bush does not have a strategy for victory in Iraq. Rather, he hopes to prevent defeat and pass the problem along to his successor.

"Meanwhile, the frustration of Americans is mounting so fast that Congress might end up mandating a rapid pullout, even at the risk of precipitating chaos and a civil war that becomes a regional war."

In the senator's view, the situation in Iraq seems analogous to what happened in Bosnia, thus offering the Bush administration a similar opportunity "despite its profound strategic misjudgments in Iraq". He argued that "to seize it, however, America must get beyond the present false choice between 'staying the course' and 'bringing the troops home now' and choose a third way that would wind down our military presence responsibly while preventing chaos and preserving our key security goals."

As in Bosnia in the 1990s, he continued, the idea here is also "to maintain a united Iraq by decentralising it, giving each ethno-religious group Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab room to run its own affairs, while leaving the (weak) central government in charge of common interests."

Biden was aware that his proposal is going to run into opposition when he maintains without much evidence that "things are already heading towards partition: increasingly, each community supports federalism, if only as a last resort."

No reasonable Iraqi would be willing to accept the partitioning of his country, regardless of the packaging and as evidenced during the long Iraq-Iran war when the Shiites adhered to their nationalist ties.

Even the Kurdish community in the north shows no signs of splintering.

Moreover, the word "partition" has an ugly ring in Arab ears, especially after what happened in Palestine in 1948 where the Jewish immigrants from Europe who owned much less than 10 per cent of the land were accorded by the United Nations more than 50 per cent of the country, especially the more fertile regions and the coveted coastal areas overlooking the Eastern Mediterranean.

In fact, partition of Iraq will contribute to further instability in the region and will be rejected by all the neighbouring partners of Iraq.

George Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com