Published September 30th, 2007 by Future Atlas
Iraq: “bottom-up partition”
Writing in the Washington Post earlier this month, Jackson Diehl argued that events in Iraq are pushing the country to a kind of solution:
This is a loose confederation of at least three self-governing regions, each with its own government, courts and security forces; and a weak federal government whose main function will be redistributing oil revenue so that each region gets a share based roughly on its proportion of the population.
He notes several drivers:
- The Kurds are proceeding with their projects in the long-autonomous north, and have passed their own oil and gas law.
- The south is organizing itself for autonomy as well, with SCIRI, the most powerful Shiite party, pushing the project.
- The ethnically mixed areas around Baghdad that were home to many Iraqis in favor of a stronger federal state are being cleared out (as noted by Future Atlas earlier).
- Iraqi opinion is shifting: as of March, 42% of Iraqis supported “regional” or independent states as a political solution to Iraq’s instability, more than double the 18% who favored that outcome in 2004.
Diehl also suggests that new anti-al Qaeda sentiment among Sunnis provides a future alternative to jihadist rule in Sunni areas even if Iraq fragments. (See this April Future Atlas post.)
There are downsides, Diehl writes: “It’s possible that one of the regional mini-states, in the oil-rich Shiite south, will become an Iranian client, while Sunnis in the West may be ruled by the same toxic Arab national socialism championed by Saddam Hussein.”
It is also clear that an oil-sharing agreement is crucial to any settlement between the regions, and any agreement could quickly unravel as the regions eyed each other with animosity. With the collapse of an agreement, the temptation to shift the new borders to secure oil fields could easily trigger new wars between the fragments of what was once Iraq.