Pandora’s Box

This week the Iraqi parliament unceremoniously showed the US the door, and set a timeline for American troop withdrawal. It would seem that Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, for all of his flaws, is no American stooge, having hammered this deal out over the course of a year in the teeth of the Bush administration. The passage of the timetable has been another punch in the gut for President Bush. An odd kind of despondency has overtaken George Bush in the last couple of weeks – already dubbed “the lamest of lame ducks” by the media and congressional Democrats, he has been firmly shunted to one side by first the financial crisis and then the incoming Obama administration. Moreover, Americans are desperate to get George Bush out the door. Some commentators have found themselves wondering out loud why he and Dick Cheney do not resign and leave Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the House and therefore third in the line of succession) to lead a caretaker administration. The news from Iraq, then, is either the last nail in the coffin of Bush’s legacy or, perhaps, the single glint of hope in an otherwise catastrophically bad administration.

I cannot pretend to read George Bush’s mind and I do not know how he is reacting to the timetable for withdrawal (which stipulates a phased withdrawal of American troops from population centers and, finally, the whole country by 2011). But there is reason for him to have hope. Bush has always qualified his opposition to a timetable by saying that withdrawal should first and foremost be predicated on results on the ground, and there is a good deal of evidence that things in Iraq are getting better. Violence is significantly down (thought not down enough), sectarian tensions have been reduced (though thanks largely to displacement and ethnic cleansing resulting in fewer ethnically mixed areas), and finally, the political settlement that Democrats have been harping on about for years finally looks like something more than a distant glimmer on the horizon.

You’ll have to forgive me for being skeptical. The idea that the Maliki government will lead Iraq into a golden age of peace and democracy is silly; Maliki may not be an American stooge, but he’s not much of a progressive democrat, either, and corruption runs rife in the Iraqi government. In addition, the continued political alienation of the Sunni minority coupled with the belligerence of Shia activists like Muqtada al-Sadr (who rallied more than 10,000 people in Baghdad two weeks ago to protest American troops staying as long as 2011) means that Iraq is still a toxic mix of violently opposed interest groups with no history of democracy or compromise-making. On top of this, the Iraqi army and police are still essentially inadequate, and as American troops withdraw from the cities (a process which must be complete as soon as June), there is a very real risk that they will leave a power vacuum behind that can be filled only by ad-hoc sectarian militias. This was the experience of the disastrous British withdrawal from Basra, which left the city in the hands of a patchwork of armed groups somewhere between the mujahideen and the mob. The greater likelihood, perhaps, is that the vacuum will be filled by Muqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian backers – no more palatable a situation.

Let us not forget that the risk of Iraq descending into chaos is still very real. No deal on the distribution of oil wealth has been struck, nor has the status of Kirkuk been settled, both major obstacles to any political progress. That the Sunnis have, thus far, been engaged in the political process has been perhaps the greatest step towards stability – if the Sunnis for any reason decide that their cooperation with the government has got them nothing and they bolt, the situation could deteriorate drastically. If the Kurds don’t get a settlement they like on Kirkuk, or if the situation in the rest of the country deteriorates, an independent Kurdistan could become a real possibility – leading to Turkish military intervention and a region-wide war.

The specter of the protracted and bloody disintegration of another welded-together, pseudo-federal state – the former Yugoslavia – is haunting Iraq. It took a decade of violence, genocide and foreign intervention to get the various constituent nationalities of Yugoslavia to stop killing each other, and the process is not yet finished – Kosovo’s independence is still disputed, and Bosnia is on the verge of breaking apart. The dismemberment of Iraq, should it happen, has the potential to be no better.

If sectarian conflicts around the world have taught us anything, it’s that as long as security is not ensured, a political solution is entirely impossible: so long as people are dying, no one is willing to sit down and talk. For the moment, the security situation in Iraq is at the best that it’s been in years. But America, whose troops are the only force keeping order in lieu of a functioning Iraqi army and police force, is overtired and underequipped. Given that no one else could conceivably step up to the plate (with the possible and terrifying exception of Iran), the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq could be not the victory that the Bush administration hopes for, but rather the next step in the unraveling of Iraq.