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Ethnic, Religious, Political Rifts Test U.S. Hopes for Stable Iraq
By HUGH POPE and DAVID S. CLOUD Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
If a U.S.-led force succeeds in ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the victors would inherit a traumatized society full of festering conflicts that didn't start with him and wouldn't suddenly fade with his departure. That raises some big questions: How can a stable new order take hold in Iraq? How can the nation avoid being dismembered by its neighbors or breaking up in spasms of violence like the former Yugoslavia?
The Bush administration so far has come up with only a rough blueprint for holding together a post-Hussein Iraq, a country that has always needed an outside power or a dictatorship, or both, to keep it from disintegrating. After a U.S. invasion to remove Mr. Hussein, thousands of U.S. troops would stay in the country to maintain order. The U.S. also would support the creation of an international civil authority, possibly headed by an American, that would administer the country for at least two years before a new Iraqi government takes full control.
One sticky issue U.S. officials say has been decided: Iraq's new government should emerge from within the country during the period when the U.S. or some international body is overseeing the country. That would appear to relegate the active Iraqi exile community -- a group long committed to overthrowing Mr. Hussein and setting its members up as leaders of a new government -- to an advisory role.
Here's a look at the main challenges the U.S. would face when invading forces collide with the on-the-ground realities of a nation whose history has been plagued by violent power transitions and bloody strife:
In the North: Kurds' Aspirations
Iraq's new rulers would have to deal with the rising aspirations of the country's five million ethnic Kurds. They are part of the 20 million ethnic Kurds living in the mountain valleys of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. The Kurds as a whole constitute the largest non-Arab ethnic group without a state in the Middle East, and their desire for autonomy and ultimately nationhood has brought them into repeated clashes with their host countries.
Within Iraq, each government since the 1958 revolution that threw out the monarchy has tried to appease Kurdish aspirations through negotiation and offers of increased autonomy. Each wound up fighting the Kurds in the end to hold the country together. Mr. Hussein, too, has taken both tacks: Kurdish historians say his repression has led to the deaths of at least 180,000 Kurds.
Since 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. has protected Iraqi Kurds by enforcing a "no-fly zone" banning the Iraqi air force from most of Kurdish territory. In 1991, Baghdad cut all official links to northern Iraq, and, thanks to their U.S. protection, couldn't prevent the Kurds from holding elections to a regional parliament the following year. The assembly was based in Arbil for two years until it broke in two during a Kurdish civil war. After intense U.S. mediation, the two sides made peace and reconvened the parliament in Arbil in October.
The Iraqi Kurds' formal political goal now is autonomy and a share of Iraqi oil wealth. Their leaders say they have permanently shelved talk of statehood, which last slipped from the Kurds' grasp in the bargaining between European powers that remapped the Middle East after World War I.
Despite having officially relinquished the dream of nationhood, however, Iraqi Kurds have adopted enough of the trappings of statehood to make their neighbors nervous: not just a parliament, but soldiers wearing "Kurdistan Army" insignia, regionwide Kurdish-language television stations and a constitution that calls for a Kurdish capital in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
And some Kurds still openly espouse the dream of nationhood. Sadar Ismail, a 25-year-old champion body builder who trains on weight machines welded together from spare engine chains, pulleys and girders, competes throughout Iraq. But his real dream: "I want the Americans to attack Saddam. That way we'll get a Kurdish state and I can compete as a Kurd."
Yet the U.S. has no intention of fanning Kurdish hopes for statehood, and, in deference to Turkey, has backed away from an early nod toward the increased autonomy many Kurds want. Turkey's military, which spent 15 years crushing a Kurdish independence movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, has vowed to invade northern Iraq if those Kurdish hopes are fulfilled. Some fear such scenarios could end with Iraq being dismembered by its neighbors.
The Bush administration says it has discouraged Kurdish proposals for a federal system of government that could foster a "binational state," as one State Department official puts it, dividing Iraq among Kurds and Arabs with a weak central government. The U.S. seems to favor ideas that divide power along regional, rather than ethnic or religious, lines. That would leave the Kurds with a dominant political voice where they are the majority but preserve a role for other minorities such as Turkmen and Chaldean Christians.
Diplomats hope the maintenance of Iraq's oil fields -- the second-richest in the world after Saudi Arabia -- and the division of their revenue can force Iraq's disparate groups to collaborate. But oil-rich Kirkuk looks more ripe for conflict. It is currently controlled by Arabs settled there by Mr. Hussein, who has displaced Kurds, Turkmen and other minorities from the city. Kurdish fighters have vowed to retake it; Turkmen groups, sometimes backed by Turkey, have staked their own claim.
The Pentagon has decided against using Kurdish fighters -- some 50,000 well-trained soldiers and another 50,000 militiamen -- as a proxy force to overthrow Mr. Hussein, the way the U.S. did with Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Pentagon wants to insert U.S. troops in the north, possibly in Kirkuk, from the start of any U.S. invasion in part to keep Kurdish forces from claiming territory to augment their political power in a post-Hussein Iraq.
One concern among U.S. policy makers is that Mr. Hussein, if convinced of his imminent downfall from a U.S. invasion, might try to buy time by attacking the Kurds, perhaps with chemical weapons. This would aim to derail U.S. plans with chaos and confusion similar to the panicked flight of 1.5 million Kurds into Turkey and Iran following the Gulf War. For now, the Kurds are vowing to sit tight, and the Turks and Iranians say they will close their borders.
In the South: a Volatile Mix
A ground invasion of Iraq probably would include a force pushing northward from the Kuwaiti desert through the vast plains and occasional marshes of southern Iraq to Baghdad. The invading forces would pass through one of the country's most complex and brutalized regions, known for its volatile mix of tribal and ethnic allegiances.
Populated mostly by Shiites, the south has long been a hotbed of opposition to Mr. Hussein's predominantly Sunni rule. The Sunnis regard themselves as the Muslim mainstream, adhering to the collected sayings and doings of the prophet Muhammad. The Shiites split off during Islam's first civil war, in which they supported leadership of Muslims by senior members of the prophet's family, and place stronger faith in their priesthood. In the Muslim world overall, Sunnis dominate numerically. They are in the minority in Iraq, at 18% of the population, but provide most of the ruling class and state bureaucracy. The Shiites are by far the country's majority sect, at 55% of the populace.
Aside from longstanding religious differences, southerners have other reasons to resent Baghdad. Some southern cities erupted in rebellion against the government after the Gulf War. Fierce opponents of Mr. Hussein took refuge in the labyrinthine marshlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In a fit of environmental destruction, the Iraqi leader had the vast swamps drained, scattering and persecuting not only rebels but also a half million natives known as Marsh Arabs. Most of them, even poorer than most Iraqis, settled uneasily into the cities of the south, and make up many of the million or so Iraqis forcefully uprooted in recent years.
In contrast to the openly pro-West north, conditions in the south haven't improved much since 1991. U.N. sanctions have hit the population hard. The marsh drainings, along with battles and an infrastructural collapse, have poisoned the environment. Many groves of palm trees stand with drooping heads, dying of an ailment no one can pin down. Daily flyovers and regular bombings by U.S. jets enforcing a southern "no-fly zone" have left southern cities such as Basra, Amara, Najaf and Kerbala with few open fans of the West.
On a recent day, Saadia Ejem, a 40-year-old housewife, sat with several neighbors in a shop in Basra, 250 miles southeast of Baghdad. It was built on the site where a rocket destroyed a house and killed seven people during an allied air bombardment of the city on Jan. 26, 1991.
Each of the people at the table had a tale of hardship. Two of Ms. Ejem's children were killed by that rocket. The Gulf War cost Musa Mansur his longtime job as an English teacher in Kuwait. Ahmed Riza, a butcher, lost a foot on one front in the fighting with Iran and an eye on another. Housewife Juwaida Kazem, 47, a year ago developed breast cancer and can't afford to have it treated. Cancer has become one of Iraq's worsening health problems. According to the Baghdad Radiology Hospital, 30% of Iraqi cancer patients nationwide can't afford the trip to the hospital, Iraq's only radiation-treatment facility.
In the suburban neighborhood around the shop, the roads are pitted with deep potholes and often filled with sewage. Many of the concrete two-story houses are damaged and unpainted. For several years after the Gulf War, nobody collected domestic garbage, which was dumped in a canal nearby. That trash has now been partially dredged out onto piles of filth and rubble beside the waterway.
Improving these conditions would go a long way toward reconciling the population to any occupying power, Western diplomats in Iraq say. But an invasion could also worsen conditions in the short term, if the supply of power or the flow of parts for utilities such as water purification is disrupted. A lot of Iraqi piped water still includes untreated sewage. "The situation is already quite perilous," says Robert Yallop, head of international operations for CARE Australia and a resident of Baghdad for several years in the 1990s.
Perhaps the biggest concern in the south would be heading off the sort of brutal revenge-seeking that marked the 1991 uprising. In the course of the rebellion, the local populace viciously attacked loyalists to the regime. While residents of the south don't possess heavy weapons, Mr. Hussein's regime has armed them with plenty of guns to fight the U.S. If central control is smashed by U.S. bombing, in remote places such as this, the weapons could be turned on fellow Iraqis to settle old scores or protect territory.
Sitting in a traditional vaulted guesthouse built of reeds from the Euphrates, Rashash al-Amara, a 65-year-old pro-government sheik, looked across the land around him, left parched by Mr. Hussein's drainage campaign. "It was water as far you could see. Now it's all dry," he said. He boasted that his 6,000-person tribe, the Amara, has formed an armed militia of 1,500 men and is prepared to fend off foreign invaders, just as he says his forefathers drove off the British.
Another potential powder keg: As civil order unravels, many Iraqis are likely to retreat into the protection of tribal clans. These play a major role in Iraqi society, and their intensely protective tribal codes could bring quick violent retribution for threats or injury to their members. Some worry that Iran might even intervene in the name of protecting fellow Shiite Muslims.
"I am sure there's going to be revenge-taking," says Dr. Azzam al-Wash, an Iraqi exile who maintains ties to southern Shiites. "The problem for the U.S. will be how to establish law and order to prevent this cycle from becoming civil war."
To head off a cycle of violence, U.S. officials are trying to forge alliances with Shiite leaders who they hope can reassure their followers that the U.S. occupation will mean greater political power for Shiites. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recently wrote a letter to Muhammad Bakir al-Hakim, a fundamentalist leader of an Iran-based exile group known as the Supreme Council of the Islamic Resolution in Iraq, inviting him to consider sending followers through a Pentagon program to train them as a police force that would help put an Iraqi face on U.S. efforts to maintain security, a U.S. official said. It isn't clear if Mr. al-Hakim, who has refused all offers of U.S. help in the past, will accept. The U.S. also is reaching out to more-moderate Shiite clerics in the hope of persuading their followers to greet the U.S. troops as liberators, not conquerers.
(The Wolfowitz ploy has got to be one of the stupidest things I've read in a long time. --hncl)
In the Center: a Sunni Dilemma
The U.S.-led coalition would encounter some of its toughest challenges in the center of Iraq -- in Baghdad and across the heartland occupied by the minority Sunni Muslim population. There the Sunni elite would find themselves threatened as they haven't been since the British took the region away from the Ottoman Turks after World War I.
Although Sunni Muslims make up no more than 18% of Iraq's population, they have dominated the country's affairs for centuries. From their ranks have come not only Mr. Hussein but also a long line of sheiks, monarchs and strongmen stretching back through British rule to the administrations of the Ottoman Turks. Sunnis play crucial roles in operating the country day to day, from holding key positions in its military to overseeing public services such as water and health care.
Were Mr. Hussein ousted by a U.S.-led strike, Washington would also have to decide how thoroughly to purge important vehicles of Sunni dominance, such as the military and the two-million-member Ba'ath party, since these are also key pillars of Mr. Hussein's regime.
Senior officials in Mr. Hussein's security forces and others responsible for acts of oppression would likely be tried under international criminal statutes, according to Bush administration officials. But the administration is leaning toward keeping the number of prosecutions limited to a dozen or so top officials, including Mr. Hussein and his sons, according to a U.S. official. Mr. Hussein's security apparatus will be dismantled and any of their members seeking amnesty would be required to participate in an Iraqi-run process similar to the Truth Commission used in South Africa, the official says.
Figuring out where to draw the line in the Ba'ath party will be even tougher. The party was formed in Syria in 1940 as a pan-Arab political movement to oppose imperialism and colonialism. It has a presence in many Middle Eastern countries and has been the ruling party in both Syria and Iraq. Under Mr. Hussein, however, it has become little more than one of his many vehicles for exercising internal control. Even junior officials far removed from Mr. Hussein are forced to join the party, and its reach into Iraqi society stretches far beyond its membership rolls when members' families are counted.
U.S. commanders will have to decide how much of the ruling Ba'ath Party to keep on. Its members' failures and abuses of power have wrecked the party's former ideological prestige as the leading institution of an oil-rich, Arab nationalist state. But one European diplomat in Baghdad says that, perhaps under a new name, it could be the only viable means of administering the country and keeping it together.
Some observers suggest that the U.S. shouldn't become wedded to the policy of holding Iraq together if Mr. Hussein's regime falls. Peter Galbraith, an expert on Iraqi Kurdistan and a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, calls the idea of a "democratic and unified Iraq" a dangerous contradiction. The West, he says, only needs to look at the bloody disintegration of the former Yugoslavia to see the perils involved.
"The breakup of a country is a terrible thing," he says. "But it can be even worse to try to hold them together."
-- Bill Spindle contributed to this article.