WHY DIVIDING IRAQ SOUNDS GOOD, BUT IT’S 100 YEARS TOO LATE

…The oil fields of Iraq.

Had Winston Churchill known about all the oil in the middle-east, Iraq’s borders might have been very different.

First, take the George W. Bush administration, plus his war-mongering advisors.  Add the corporate oil executives that in 2002 were drooling over all that Iraqi oil.  All of these individuals had no clue as to what kind of “Pandora’s Box” they would be opening when they invaded Iraq. 

 

And it is amazing that some of these idiots are still saying that “Invading Iraq was a good thing to do”.

Today, Iraq is tearing itself apart. Its government has lost control of large parts of the country; the violence is out-of-control with the ISIL terrorists, and al Qaeda in Iraq has been resurrected.

Some people today are even bringing back the old idea that re-surfaced back in 2006 with Joseph Biden, the then US Senator and now Vice President, who argued that it was time to split Iraq into three parts: Kurdish, Shia and Sunni territories.   

 

Iraq today is a country whose Shia Army doesn’t want to fight for themselves.  Americans are saying that if the Iraqi Army won’t stand and fight for their own country, why should we be sending over our military trainers and advisors to be in harm's way?

This is a very fair question.  But since George W. Bush decided to invade, there aren’t any easy answers to a very complex question.

OK, to understand the situation, first let’s look at Iraq in its current situation. 

Many people today aren’t aware that Iraq is a country that does not have natural boundaries.  Iraq's borders were created at a conference after WW I in Cairo in 1921.  This was largely thanks to Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), who were among about 40 British officials gathered at the Semiramis Palace on the Nile river. They effectively, just took out a map and invented Iraq, then setting up Faisal bin Hussein as the King of this new country.

Faisal was a Sunni Muslim who wasn't even from Iraq. British policy at the time was to promote the interests of the Sunni and other minorities as a counter-balance to the then large Shia majority.  The British also expelled the country’s troublesome Shia clergy. 

 

These became the same tools that Saddam Hussein would later find useful, a half-century later, when he took over as the Sunni Dictator of Iraq.

Against the advice of several world experts, the new 1921 Iraq also included the Kurdish-dominated province of Mosul.  This was intended as a buffer against both Turkey and Russia, Russia was soon to become the giant communist USSR.

OK, so that’s how we got the country of Iraq in the early 20^th Century.

Vice President Biden’s idea was that since Iraq was all a made-up pipe-dream decades ago by the Western European countries, why not break it up the way it should have been back in 1921?

Well, the world has changed a lot over the last 100 years.  Big oil was discovered in the middle east and it is the largest revenue producer for a region that before the oil, nomadic tribes were all that existed in these vast Arabian deserts.

This arbitrary European carve-up of the Middle-East began with what was called the Sykes Picot agreement, with the French taking the responsibility to govern Syria and Lebanon.  The British took what was then Palestine and Iraq. In 1919 the League of Nations rubber-stamped the French and the British administration of these vast areas of what had previously been the Ottoman Empire.

So, the first big issue is for considering the dividing of Iraq up into three areas for the Sunni’s, Shia’s and the Kurd’s.  Unfortunately, if that were to be done today, the Sunni areas in the west would not be economically viable unless they received a share of oil revenues from the other two regions. 

 

The traditional Sunni territory is the only part of Iraq that is not sitting on lakes of oil.  Since these groups have all hated each other with a vengeance for centuries, they would never agree to sharing the oil revenues.

Ramzy Mardini, an Iraq expert has said: "For a decade now, they have been unable to pass a revenue-sharing oil law.  How will you get Shiite Iraq to share their revenues with Sunni [and Kurdish] Iraq? And how do you get the Iraqis to agree on the borders of the regions? That would require political settlements on all disputed territories - and we now know how hard that has been to do for the last decade."

What has driven this hatred further, which by-the-way goes back to the 6^th century, is that since those forced changes in 1921, the problems between these “tribes” have only gotten worse.

For three decades, Saddam Hussein, who was a Sunni, used his army to suppress and kill the Shias and the Kurds. 

Now, for the last ten years, since the invasion, Iraq's Shiite rulers have been doing the same to the Sunni population. The Sunnis' main grievance today is that the Shia army raids their homes in the middle of the night for no reasons.  With so much bad blood between them, it is unlikely that any of the Iraqis will ever trust the Shia army to protect them or to defend the country. In fact, most people in Iraq fear the Iraqi police and soldiers more than they fear the ISIL insurgents.

Iraq's Shiites and Kurds had revolted against Saddam's army whenever they had a chance and today the Iraqi Sunnis and ISIL Sunni’s have been killing Shia Iraqi soldiers without mercy.

The hard fighting Kurds for their part, cannot even stand the thought of any Iraqi soldiers, either Sunni or Shia, stepping on their land. At the same time, they feel betrayed by how they helped rebuild Iraq after the 2003 invasion, but they were gradually shunned out of any government posts.  Their share of the budget was also cut by the Shia’s running Baghdad.  The Bagdad Shia’s have also developed a close relationship with the Shia’s that are running their neighbor, Iran.

Today, everyone is aware that Iraq sits on a sea of oil. But it also sits on many mass graves. For a people who have been abused by each other for so many years, the best solution would be to go their separate ways. Iraq has now gone way beyond the point of being able to keep Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, all under one roof.

But, until someone can come up with a fair way to make that happen, the problem will be like the on-going issues between the Jews and the Muslims in Israel.  Only instead of needing a “Two State Solution” as Israel, Iraq needs a “Three-State Solution”.

And with the Civil War in neighboring Syria and the insurgent actions of the ISIL terrorists, and the fact that Turkey doesn’t want a separate Iraqi Kurdish state next to their borders.  You can see, there’s a mess of mid-east problems that the average American wishes that Bush had never gotten the US involved in Iraq.

The reality is that today’s Iraq was a bad idea in 1921, and it’s become an even worse idea since, but there are no easy answers.

It’s going to take some miracles before these issues are ever resolved.

Copyright G.Ater  2015