Iraq, The New Yugoslavia?
By Cernig Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 7:30am
Isn't it amazing how quickly Iraq has slipped down the list of defining issues for the presidential election, after every pundit in the country originally opining that it would be the defining argument to be fought? Of course, since those pronouncements we've had Georgia and the progressively chillier disagreement with Russia, we've had Afghanistan and especially Pakistan go to hell in a handbasket and we've had the economy do an impression of Chernobyl. Oh, and the Witchfinder from Alaska.
But there are still stormclouds on the Iraqi horizon, no matter that the Right wants to declare a whole new Mission Accomplished banner day. The Sunni Awakening is getting restless, the Shiite majority still have nasty internal feuds to resolve and the Kurds...well, Bush's bestest Iraqi allies throughout the occupation still have a damn good chance of being the spark that sets off a regional powderkeg. The Turks have already come very close to getting embroilled in an Iraqi mess when they sent a large force across the border last winter against Kurdish PKK separatist terrorists and are already set to do it again. The danger was always that the Kurds' military, the peshmerga, would turn out to resist the incursion and drag the Iraqi central government in too leaving the US torn between ripping up either the NATO alliance or years of Iraqi occupation.
So it was interesting recently to see an interview with Ahmet Davutoglu, the chief foreign policy aide to Turkey's prime minister, on the Council For Foreign Relations' website a few days ago. He warned that recent optimism on Iraq in the United States overlooks significant, dangerous problems which remain unresolved and set out a viewpoint that says Iraq should be seen as a Yugoslavia on the verge of breakdown.
There is Shiite, there is Sunni, there is Kurd, there is Turkoman. ... Iraq's constitution again and again refers to Shiites, refers to Sunnis, to Arabs, Kurds, and it creates its own dilemma. Having rights, I mean cultural rights, ethnic rights, but trying to establish an order based on these ethnicities, based on these identities and other differences. So, Yugoslavia has collapsed, but without getting any lesson from Yugoslavia we are trying to create another Yugoslavia in the Middle East. The Lebanese, because of this political structure, had a twenty-year civil war. But Iraq became another Lebanon because of ethnic and sectarian definitions.
Where is, for example, the most alarming indication of this is in Kirkuk. Iraq is a small [microcosm of the] Middle East. You have all the ethnicities of the Middle East in Iraq. And Kirkuk is a small Iraq.
Kirkuk, he says, is "like creating a bomb and giving it to the people."
Of course, you couldn't have prevented the break up of Yugoslavia just by carefully keeping any mentions of ethnic divisions out of official documents, and that's highly unlikely to work in Iraq either. Tito managed it by being a charismatic, ruthless strongman, a real-life heroic leader against an evil occupation and playing strongly to nationalism he continually worked to define. And without him, it broke apart in short order. I just don't see any kind of Tito figure in Iraq at present.
And the Kurds keep pushing the central government. After a recent confrontation between peshmerga and the Iraqi Army which ended just short of actual shooting at a small disputed town Northwest of Baghdad last month, there was no conciliatory mood.
"The current problem is over borders, because they [the Iraqi government] believe the borders of Kurdistan should be where the former ousted regime [of President Saddam Hussein] decided on," said Massoud Barzani, president of Iraq's northern Kurdistan region, in a meeting with Kurdish journalists on Sep. 28.
"From now on, if Iraq sends its forces to somewhere in disputed areas, then we will dispatch our forces to the same spot as well. If they send one brigade, we will send two," Barzani said.
His remarks raised the current tensions to a new level, signaling that Kurds will not shy away from fighting the army of the very government whose president is Kurdish, as well as some key ministers.
Last month, Sheikh Homam al-Hamudi, a Shia Arab who heads the Iraqi Parliament's foreign relations committee, warned Kurds on behalf of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that "any [Kurdish] Peshmarga who violates the blue line will be chased out by the [Iraqi] security forces."
The blue line refers to the official border between areas under Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) jurisdiction and the rest of Iraq. KRG runs the three northern provinces of Arbil, Sulaimaniya and Dohuk and has no official jurisdiction over Khanaqin, Kirkuk and Nineveh province, home to the city of Mosul.
So now the Kurds are looking at the possibility of a civil war with the Iraqi government and a cross-border war with their massive neighbour to the North, both in search of their own independent homeland. In either case, the US gets to play piggy in the middle, damned whichever side it takes.
One alternative that has been mooted in the past was a soft partition, peaceably rather than through war and under a "federal" disguise, which might give everyone enough of what they wanted that no-one would start shooting. Joe Biden has been a major proponent of that plan but it only has two major problems - back when the US could have imposed it by fiat it would have led to civil war (whoever breaks up Iraq will have the Sunnis who were used to ruling it all under Saddam clamoring for their blood) and now there's no way that Maliki, believing himself a strongman, will allow it to happen.
Maliki, though, isn't as strong as he thinks he is and I'm just no longer sure there are enough Iraqis so see themselves as Iraqis first and foremost to do the job of keeping it all together. If there were, surely a multi-sectarian nationalist coalition (like the one that has kept promising it will form under various secular leaders from Chalabi to Allawi) would have already taken power by a parliamentary defeat of the separatist Powers That Be. I can quite understand why Ambasador Davutoglu thinks that ethnic and religious differences among Iraq's leadership are bound to flare again - and I don't believe there's a whole lot America or anyone else can do about that.
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Couldn't see that coming!
and autism epidemic that no public health figure wants to admit too
1 in 60 boys
But the Surge worked and Petraeus is a hero!
It is an illegal occupation.
And lots of incumbents running against their records. At some point they will even openly criticize their own records and say that they are the change that is necessary. Don't believe me...watch Lindsay Graham on Fox News last Sunday.
Well, DUH! The middle east has long been a region of ethnic/religious factions.
Iraq itself was/is an artificial creation of Great Britain after the first world war; the better to administrate an area of colonization and remove it's natural resource: oil.
So, WWI vultures are coming home to roost.
The phony state of "Iraq" is up in arms.
A great place to be if you happen to have cronies in the petroleum and "defense" corporations.
As much as I hate to say it, Saddam was better at ruling Iraq than anyone else. The best way to keep regional and ethnic disputes from erupting is to rule with an iron fist.
Did you know Sarah Palin did another interview?
It was an act of US aggression predicated on a false pretext.
The public was misinformed of the status and conduct of the 'war' through a de facto and illegal program of propaganda conducted by the Pentagon and instituted through the compliant Corporate Media which likely continues to this day.
A program that was NEVER reported by that same Corporate Media.
The spigot to the war profiteers is very difficult to turn off.
Our government is corrupt.
'Nam.
If Iraq didn’t have gobs of black-goo under their sand we wouldn’t give a rat’s tail about them or their silly little sand-squabbles. They would be like Chad – 4th page 3rd column news.
But we need their goo, and we’ve made them rich and powerful by buying it.
Let’s get off the goo!
It's not enough to say, "Hey, such-and-such was wrong about the Iraq War."
These people need to be voted out, Democrat and Republican alike. There's nothing about this war and the damage done to our democracy that hasn't been exacerbated by the enablers and codependents in Congress.
Taarak @ 11:
Not while ExxonMobile is the largest corporation in the world.
Shadowgm Hussein @ 12:
Votes will not change anything.
Revolution will change things.
But the larger part of the population is not suffering enough to do that.
They're still eating bread and enjoying the circus.
When you hit someone in their pocketbook, that takes their mind off of everything else. Right now everyone is watching their retirement account melt down to chump change.
McCain is the loser in this in that foreign affairs and wars are supposed to be his strong suit, and everyone is focused on the economy. I wouldn't be surprised to begin hearing more and more about what is happening in Iraq as election day draws nearer. The problem for McCain is he has crowed about the success of the surge so much that any failure over there right now would be to his detriment.
Mick Piobr @ 13:
And that sums it up quite nicely. There's no economic motivator to get 'off of oil,' not when oil companies, despite market shenanigans by OPEC, pull in 'record profits' every fracking quarter.
Currently, there's no inventor poised to shake them loose, either.
It's why we don't want to expand NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was not meant to include every "break-away Republic" across Asia. That would require building a brand new alliance network. Contrary to some opinions, "we ARE NOT all Georgians now." Canada is a member too, and as a Canadian I say NO.
I actually think they've found oil in Chad but I do get the point.
Nice to see the Battlestar Galactica love by the way.
Shadowgm Hussein @ 16:
Everyone should see the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car"
The technology has already been invented; the patent for the "superbattery" has been bought by ExxonMobile.
The documentary interviews the inventor of the superbattery.
The problems with the electric car are numerous.
That is, for the oil and automotive corporations.
The biggest problem (for ExxonMobile) is that it does not use petroleum.
It does not require much by way of maintanence or parts - and parts/repair is a major megabusiness belonging to the automakers.
Serolf Divad @ 8:
Luckily, I think only the true believers will even know about it, let alone see it.
So null benefit to them then.
Oh what's 600,000 officially tallied dead anyway? I mean, when compared to our economy and me not being able to buy that 60 inch LCD I wanted....
the irony is the evangilcal religious right supported this ill fated war that ended up hurting Iraqi Christians allot. During Saddam's reign, Christian towns were safe from sectarian violence.
Iraqi Christians are witnessed the biggest exodus and refereeing numbers per capita compared to Sunnis and Shia.
Good job Bush, good job evangelical non-nonsensical religious right contradictors of no sense
What the idiots who got us into Iraq didn't count on or even realize was that, nobody came to Iraq to seek religious freedom and escape intolerance the way the colonists came to early America. We fought for independence with a united front and although difficult, freedom and democracy prevailed. It hasn't always been equitable or just and corrections have been made but the system was created by like minded individuals; it WASN'T THRUST UPON US. The devisiveness in Iraq today is a centuries old conflict of religious ideologies; there is no consideration or tolerance of any other opinion and so ethnic tensions arise and clashes occur. It was foolish to think we'd go to Iraq and think we'd be greeted as liberators. This is all following the stupidity of going there in the first place because of some imaginery "imminent threat". So, Sen. McCain, W., Darth Cheney, Wolfo-lack-of-witz, Rummy and all the rest of the idiots who got us into Iraq should pay dearly for their stupidity.
So will a McCain/Palin administration go back to that old time values thing and resurrect the Salem Witch Burnings? They could run it out of the existing Faith-Based programs office.
America should leave. One of the great lies McCain was allowed to utter without criticism during the first "debate" with Obama was that if America left precipitously from Iraq (as supposedly advocated by Obama a little lie serving as handmaiden to a greater lie) and should the situation devolve into chaos, then America would be bound to send troops back in to stabilize things.
On a side note, I say that Religulous garnered an "R" rating for blasphemy???? The things our society does—and doesn't—consider obscene!
What would Zeus do? @ 26:
Yes, indeedy; titties - bad
Free thought - really bad
Blind faith and murder : Godblessamurkkka!
Of course, I've been predicting another Yugoslavia all along
Starting around 1980 I began making notes for a King Arthur book, never written, and the first question I asked myself was what would happen when the heavy handed Roman Legions left Britain? I felt ancient, long-simmering, rivalries would erupt. They could be the motivation of the 11 kings King Arthur had to defeat in his 13 battles.
So when Yugoslavia fell, I anticipated problems with the Croats, Serbs and Muslims after the heavy hand of Tito was removed; and I anticipated violence between the Sunni, Shia and Christians after the heavy hand of Saddam was removed, particularly after I heard they were talking about walled off enclaves.
Well isn't that pretty much what the oil companies that are using our armed forces as a mercenary force to pull off the biggest armed robbery in history wanted all along? A complete break-up of the country so that they could more easily swoop in as the vultures that they are and pick the bones of Iraq clean?
ysbaddaden @ 28:
they should have listened to you.
Terrible @ 29:
with blackwater as a backup
How come no one is talking about the balkanization of the United States? After all, an economic collapse prompted the breakup of the Soviet Union. Iraq isn't the only place following Yugoslavia.
One word: Kurdistan.
The lines in the sand are just as arbitrary as they were when they were originally drawn, it might be time to shift them.
30 BaScOmBe hearts Rachel Maddow hates MSM Says:
I'm still occasionally writing notes about the book, but it's getting closer to the Mabinogion, and particularly on the tale of How Culhwych Won Olwen (the eponymous source for my own nom de guerre herein.)
No Lancelot, with spellings like Myrddin, Ysbaddaden, Gwenhwyfar etc, and large dollups of occultic theory worked into the plotting.
But if I could move heaven and earth to get it published, who would read the damned thing?
Iraq's Josip Broz Tito = Saddam Hussein...
This analogy is correct. Everybody thought that Saddam Hussein was like Hitler, when in fact he was really Tito.
Now the inmates are running the asylum... who knew?
SPiHC @ 33:
I prefer Laurelstan.
Oh how quickly we forget......
Don't you guys remember this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzGGS6GXVIY
It's simple really. It proves that Bush is a poor CIC. He's not a tactician. He's not a diplomat. He doesn't have a good grasp of the intricacies of foreign affairs. He's only a petty figure who dreams of being a dictator in the steps of Stalin and Hitler. Furthermore, he's representative of neo-con policy which has run our standing with the world into the ground. Not only are we the laughing stocks of the world; we are the villains of the world.
As a result, Bush helped two regimes in this major catastrophe: Iran and Saudi Arabia.
ysbaddaden @ 34:
I would.
I read an adaptation of the Mabinogion about twenty years ago by a contemporary authoress that was great - wish I could remember her name...
Ancient myths are fascinating - as long as they are not used by idiots as the foundation of a religion, like some cloud gods of zion that I won't mention.
Iraqyuslavia?
Mick Piobr @ 40:
Just add a Gandolf vs Dumbledore face-off – you’ll sell a million copies…
WHERE THE HELL IS CHENEY?
Can anyone tell me the last time he was seen in public? Has he left the Shrub to stew in his own oil?
Iraq was Cheney and his neocon cohorts business plan all along. Shell is already back in doing business as usual. Private armies remain unchecked protecting US business interests there.
One can also add that Pakistan could be the new Cambodia with not only Bush but both major candidates claiming that the United States has the right to invade a sovereign country covertly in order to go after "terrorists."
Iraq, The New Yugoslavia?
That depends, will we buy cars called Iraqo's?
Taarak @ 42:
Geriatric Gay Sex?
43 viola Says: WHERE THE HELL IS CHENEY?
Methinks you just answered your own question.
viola @ 43:
The dick is busy trying to start up a cold war with Russia at the moment. He has made a few speeches regarding that recently.
Iraq is a western power creation. Just like Yugoslavia. It has no historical reason for being or popular support among the various people who live there.
The US lost all credibility in this discussion by supporting the breakup of Yugoslavia and Kosovo independence. We made it worse with our interference with Georgia.
Sadly, the US is a master of hypocrisy. We change positions like the wind, when ever it seems to be to the advantage of the ruling party.
Partition works. See Yugoslavia.
The Cheney/Bush Crime Family plan has always been to, ultimately, divide and conquer Iraq.
It is the only rationale that makes sense when Bremmer disbanded the Iraqi military and police and central government, ostensibly to shut out ALL of those bad, bad Bath'ists. The violent Sunni uprising, separate and combined with "al Queda in Iraq", against the USA and Coalition forces as well as the other main religious sects was practically guaranteed.
And what happens when one religious faction wages a insurgent war against its' neighboring religious factions? The Cheney/Bush Crime Family were following a Machiavellian "firefighter" plan that would contain the perimeter of the "grass fire" and let it burn itself out. Out of the ashes would only remain a war-weary docile and compliant populous, and those magnificent largely untapped oil fields.
The British, French, and USA did this to the Ottoman Empire after WW-I in order to create these countries. But just like the European imperialists in Africa, tribal and religious divisions were never taken into consideration. It was always about nice neat geographically-defined boundaries instead of cultural differences. Rising self-awareness and cultural identity has lead to civil wars in how many African nations, how many Southeast Asian nations, how many Southwest Asian nations since the end of WW-II?
So acutely has my bullshit detector been sensitized in the last decade or so that I automatically question every fact or analysis, even those supplied by friends, lest someone slip some bullshit under my radar. This is becoming quite refreshing to see analysis that passes through with nary a blip. Oddly enough, I posted a similar comment not too long ago on the Balkanization of Iraq on another blog.A right wing one. As criticism of the surge it was not well received. In retrospect I might have preferred a Londonderry comparison as far as Bagdad goes. The various religious groups and political divisions are now gated communities with the US guarding the gates. Is there no more thankless job than policing? Odd that every thinking person watching the first gulf war knew that entering Iraq could only open the mother of all cans of worms but no one could foresee this for GW11.
Taarak @ 42:
Just add a Gandolf vs Dumbledore face-off – you’ll sell a million copies…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4y6M2AeQ00
Look at that map. It is ancient. It has the USSR labeled in the northern part of it.
http://www.shalomjerusalem.com/kurdistan/kurdistan.gif
better map.
Bula @ 49:
And then you have a bunch of smaller states that usually end up close to the failed state status, and can easily be consumed up by a larger power. If you partition Iraq, the Kurds will be dominated by Turkey. They have already crossed the border to attack the Kurds a few times. If you break up Iraq, then Iran will be more empowered and will gobble up shia controlled land. This, I believe would cause a war between a scared Saudi state, and Iran, dragging the US and maybe even Israel into it as well. Think about how much that would destabilize the area, even more so than it is now.
Partitioning might have worked in the Balkans, but politics is different in every single situation, so you cannot expect partitioning to work in the middle east.
40 Mick Piobr
That was probably Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon. That came out soon after I was making my notes. I didn't much care for it. The movie Excalibur (one of my favorites) was too testosterone charged, they even made out with the ladies in their armor, now there's safe sex! Bradley's was too estrogen charged, positing a matriarchal past for England that was probably non-existent except for individual tribes like the Iceni, who for awhile were led by Queen Boudicca.
http://www.ancientworlds.net/aworlds_media/ibase_1/00/10/66/00106650_000...
What a surprise that the current administration is no better at running Iraq than they are in discerning that our economy is headed to the tank. And to think I voted for Bush in the 2000 election because I believed they couldn't help but be more competent than the Clinton crowd.
Zilam @ 54
Partitioning did work in the Balkans for the same reasons it would work in Iraq. The resulting states had nationalistic ( or in Iraq's case tribal) and religious identities. Two of the three potential states carved out of Iraq have the benefit of large oil reserves. The Balkan states were dirt poor, yet refused to be dominated and prevailed in the end (and in Serbia's case, despite sanctions against them).
My father comes from a town in the former Yugoslavia that's one of the oldest settled places in all of Europe, its roots go back to the Stone Age, so I've spent no small amount of time there myself and when I was growing up it was common knowledge among the locals that Tito was the glue that held the place together, once he was gone, look out, people were going to tear each other apart.
Which is exactly what happened.
Now with the by rope death of the strong man Saddam we're going through a repeat in Irak, big surprise.
The difference between the two being that when the US intervened in the country it ultimately led towards a peaceful solution and now the best we've been able to do in Irak, for the last five and a half years, is just make a completely foreseeable situation infinitely worse.
We always knew it was going to come to this and now its here. It's highly unlikely that the people that got us into this position have the slightest clue as to how to get us out of it, or they'd have done it already so it's time for them to fold up their tents and traveling road show and have us try something else.
~Nyc
Bula @ 49:
Yeah, that was a peaceful partition, wasn't it?
Yugoslavia wasn't really a Western creation, either. More of a Serbian creation. Historically, the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrans and Bosnians are basically the same people, sharing genes and a spoken language that pre-dates their migration to their current locales; they got their alphabet and religion (Orthodox Catholicism) from the Byzantines. They became their own kingdom- the Kingdom of Serbia- when the Byzantine Empire began to shrink, circa 800 AD. When the Turks arrived, and then the Austrians and Hungarians, there were rifts created as the separate peoples adopted the religions and/or alphabets of their conquerors.
Serbia was resurgent in the decade before the First World War, and was attempting to reform the old kingdom as Austro-Hungarian and Turkish power waned- don't forget that the first shot of WWI was fired by a Serb born and raised in Bosnia. And though it didn't go well for Serbia through that war, they held out until their Western allies won the war. The old Kingdom of Serbia was simply reborn as Yugoslavia- but it was a much different kingdom than the one they had before the arrival of the Turks, Austrians and Magyar.
And the big difference between Yugoslavia and Iraq is that Iraq is composed of three completely different ethnic groups- Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans- and the Arab majority is, of course, torn between Sunni and Shi'ites. The Brits just snapped their fingers and created one nation from four.
Landlocked countries have a hard time in the modern world.
We can call it the new Vietnam, the new Yugoslavia, etc., but this colossal cluster-fuck truly has no equal. The Surge's "success" has been illusory and ephemeral. It's all about to fall apart.
Shia civilians are still regularly killed by Sunni, Kurd, al-Queda & coalition forces.
Kurd civilians are still murdered by Turks, Sunni & Shia.
The US-financed (as in not spontaneous, you and I have paid for this in full, folks) Sunni Awakening has long been targeted by the Shiite-controlled government, al-Queda and everybody else.
The US military started handing over control of these anti-al-Queda Sunnis today. Yeah, that'll work. We've just sold out the linch pin of our Iraq "success" to their sworn enemy. Are we going to continue to pay them as Maliki's goons pick them off?
Probably.
-AF
Andrew Sullivan Is A Fraud
How about this: ...someday... the appropriate officials from Turkey, Iran and Iraq (and maybe Syria if they have a substantial Kurdish minority) sit down under UN auspices and agree give up a little territory here and there and create Kurdistan (finally)? Advantage to everyone: removal from their sides of an ethno-linguistic thorn that they neither want nor need. And presumably the Kurds might be a little grateful to be out from under their various thumbs and/or boots, and they have (at least so far) shown that they can run a reasonably decent state.
Support my petition against the Yugoslaving of Iraq.
http://www.petitiononline.com/e4i13a66/petiti...
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