GETTING OUT OF IRAQ

PARIS: How do we get out of Iraq? We don’t.

Last Wednesday, the International Herald Tribune, published for more than 100 years, printed a column by Leslie Gelb advocating the dividing of Iraq into three parts. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued closely that Iraq was never a real country. It was, and is, lines drawn on a map in 1921 by a British colonial official named Winston Churchill. Gelb’s idea was to break up Churchill’s country and remake it into what it always was, three nations: the Kurds in the north, the Shiite Muslims in the south, and Sunni Muslims in the centre.

There is one problem with that, one among many: The United States has promised not to do that. American policy for years, including most of Saddam Hussein years, has been to maintain a unified Iraq as a buffer between Iran and Israel. But, of course, the United States has promised a lot of things out there. The White House’s ever-changing plans for Iraq’s future are creating a cottage industry for outsiders with ideas for rationalising the irrational. On the same day the Herald Tribune essay was published, The Guardian in London published eight “exit strategies” by a line-up of historians and other interested parties. There are a few common threads in most of these plans: The United States should cede political control to the United Nations or to NATO; more troops are needed; and the United States is going to be out there for a long time. Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian, says more troops are needed because the American occupiers may have to go door-to-door to make Baghdad secure, which is what British forces are doing in the south.

David Owen, the former British foreign secretary, answered The Guardian by saying that what is needed is a “staying strategy.” He, too, calls for a decentralised state separating Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. One of the attractions of this new federalism is that if a united Iraq ever became honestly democratic, voters, two-thirds of them Shiites, would almost certainly choose a Shia theocracy something like Iran’s today. One of the Iraqi responders in The Guardian, Mustafa Alwari, editor of the New Iraq Today, discusses real and honest elections, and says: “If the coalition is going to make a success of its venture in Iraq, it has to bite the bullet and let the chips fall where they may.” He then adds: “No fledgling Iraqi government could run the country in its first few years without the presence of the coalition troops.” James Rubin, State Department spokesman during the Clinton years, says foreign troops (us) will have to stay at least until the end of 2005. He proposes that political control be shifted to NATO or the United Nations, perhaps with a Frenchman, Bernard Kouchner, as civil governor; and that UN arms inspectors be recalled into Iraq to free a thousand Americans (including most of our Arabic speakers), looking vainly, so far, for weapons of mass destruction, to do intelligence work on the insurgency in the Baghdad area.

The most discouraging Guardian commentary came from Said Alourish, the author of A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite. He argues that in using force in the Middle East, President Bush is bringing the world to “a cultural confrontation of unimaginable proportions.” Then he concludes: “What can be done? The options are limited. “The American-backed governing council bears a striking resemblance to the doomed monarchy the British created. “The Hashemite monarchy imposed on the country in 1921 was rejected by the Iraqi people, who saw it as a subsidiary of a foreign power.” Going back to Paul Kennedy, he tells a story of two swells — George Bush and Tony Blair — getting lost while walking in the Irish countryside. They ask a farmer how to get back to Dublin. He scratches his head and says, “Well, if I were you, sirs, I wouldn’t start from here.” But “here” is where we are now.