THE THREE-STATE SOLUTION
By Brian E. Frydenborg
It’s time for us to realize some simple history of Iraq and what it means for Iraq’s future. When Winston Churchill and his people were drawing lines on the map of the defunct Ottoman Empire as WWI closed, his priorities had nothing to do with the people. He wanted the oil fields of both the Kurdish area south of what is now Turkey and the Shia area near the Persian Gulf to be under British control. Forget that the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds all wanted nothing to do with each other. It would be like us today saying that Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank should be a single, unified state. It would make absolutely no sense
So it is that the boundaries of what would become Iraq were drawn, and that the British had their “mandate” (translated: dictatorial colonialism) over Iraq. Now, then, there should be no surprise that the Kurds already have autonomy, and that the Shias are demanding it. If that happened, then the Sunnis would be left out in the cold, with no oil revenue or economy to speak of, after having dominated everyone else since early Ottoman times. It took someone like Saddam, ruling with an iron fist, to hold Iraq together (and even he had his hands full) much like it took someone like Tito to keep Yugoslavia together. Mr. Hussein was right to be paranoid of losing his power; Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institute, among others, suggests he maintained the fiction of having WMD’s to keep his own people, the Kurds and the Shias, in check.
The question is: is there any reason for any of these groups to want to be in a state with any of the others? No.
So how can a unified Iraq succeed? The hard reality is that is can’t, especially after our bungled occupation which killed the only opportunity to create a unified, democratic Iraq, and even that was probably a long shot. Immediately after the war many Iraqis thought that may have been possible, but an absence of real Presidential leadership and two years of absolute misery, death and destruction have disillusioned Iraqis’ hopes and dreams about a unified country.
The two problems with Iraqi fragmentation are as follows: the Sunnis would be left in the cold, and the Kurdish population of southwestern Turkey would demand to join a Kurdish state in the north. Both threaten to destabilize the whole region. But this situation is far from hopeless.
The UN (just bear with me) is the solution in both cases. To placate the Sunnis, the UN could buy a small fraction of the oil fields in the Shia and Kurdish areas (perhaps 1/5) at a generous price, allowing both areas to further modernize their equipment or to restore what has been damaged as well as helping to develop their areas at large. The UN could then administer these fractions of the fields and channel all of the profits, minus the operation costs, to the Sunnis. This would be done by UN personnel with UN troops protecting them, but the whole time they would be mentoring and apprenticing Sunnis to be able to one day (soon) take over. Once the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds demonstrated that they could get past their past grievances enough to work together in peace, UN personnel and financial ties would give way fully to Sunnis who would “lease” these fields from the UN and fully operate them for their own profit. UN troops would stay and guard this “international” territory; that way, Shias or Kurds could not try to push the Sunnis out, yet, being “owned” the UN, the Shias and Kurd would not fear Sunni encroachment either. The borders of these three states- one Sunni, one Kurdish, and one Shia, would also be guarded by UN troops for a year or so till the region re-stabilized.
What about the Turkish and Iraqi Kurds? Well, convince Turkey to give up its Kurdish area and allow it to join a Kurdish national state. Perhaps you are saying, easier said than done. But this, too, would require sacrifice on everybody’s part, including the West. And to get China and Russia to go along with this, the US must lead the way.
I’m talking about giving Turkey an enormous economic aid package, accelerating its entry into the EU, and, most importantly, giving it a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Why not? Turkey, with a population of 70 million, has the largest population in the Middle East, and has 10 million more people than either Britain or France, both members of the Security Council. It also has the largest GDP in the entire Middle-East by far. It is a secular democracy and a member of NATO. What better candidate in the region?
It is hard to imagine Turkey turning down such a prestigious opportunity to be a full member of the UNSC, and doing so would help create three stable states instead of one with intermittent civil war. Bold? Yes. Impossible? No. Difficult? Yes; but anything worth trying is difficult. As the ancients used to say, “Fortune favors the bold.”
# posted by Brian @ 12:31 PM
