Iraq
Iraq is planning to clamp down on the Internet, raising concerns that it will revert to a restrictive approach more typical of the region. Iraq currently has many Internet providers and hundreds of Internet cafes.
A government official told the Associated Press that “All Web sites that glorify terrorism and incite violence and sectarianism, or those that violate social morals with content such as pornography will be banned.”
An Iraqi press freedom group said that the plan was an “attempt to control the flow of free information on the Internet and limit the knowledge of the citizens,” the AP reports.
This can be taken as another sign that the overall durability of a democratic Iraq is still in question. As the US departs, there could easily be backsliding on human rights and democratic practices. The populace will not want to be oppressed, as they were in the Saddam years, but they may well be happy to limit the freedoms and rights of ethnic, political, and religious minorities.
(Image courtesy Mike Licht, Flickr)
This week the threat of war in Iraq between Arabs and Kurds was made explicit, with the Washington Post reporting that Kurdish officials are saying that “Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region and the Iraqi government are closer to war than at any time since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”
Kurdish and Iraqi army units have engaged in standoffs over the disputed border areas, where Kurdish and Arab populations mix.
Little is being done to resolve issues: Prime Minister Maliki and Kurdish President Barzani have not even spoken in a year.
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
Iraq may still destabilize, and one of the potential faultlines became clearer two weeks ago, when the Iraqi Kurdish parliament passed a new constitution for the region, in defiance of the central government and American pressure.
The New York Times writes that the action suggests the level of mistrust between Kurdistan and the central government, and “raises the question of whether a peaceful resolution of disputes between the two is possible.” A Sunni Arab member of parliament commented that “It is a declaration of hostile intent and confrontation. Of course it will lead to escalation.”
The constitution defines Kurdistan as including not only the established provinces, but also several disputed areas, setting the stage for more clashes. Conditions are already tense enough that Kurdish and federal security forces have had several standoffs.
The result of a failure to resolves these issues could be armed conflict between Arab Iraq and the Kurds (rather than the more general fragmentation that has been more likely in the past). Though the Kurds have been attempting to build separate ties to the US, the United States would likely stand aside in such a confrontation, even if it meant disaster for the Kurds, rather than throw away the American relationship with Iraq.
The constitution may also not bode well for future Kurdish governance, as it reportedly places few checks on the power of the president of Kurdistan, potentially enabling authoritarian tendencies in the dominant Kurdish parties.
(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Thomas Ricks, author of the acclaimed Fiasco, argued recently in the Washington Post that US involvement in Iraq may be only half over.
“A smaller but long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is probably the best we can hope for,” he writes, because Iraq is more fragile than it now seems.
- Iraqi factions will likely try to break out of the current arrangements now enforced by the US. This could mean full-scale civil war.
- A military takeover is possible. An expert suggests to Ricks that “the classic conditions for a military coup were developing — a venal political elite divorced from the population lives inside the Green Zone, while the Iraqi military outside the zone’s walls grows both more capable and closer to the people.”
- Power centers in Iraq are diverse and obscure, and include former Sunni insurgents and Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Ricks suggests al-Sadr is likely to gain more power — and that he might become an American ally, as the Sadrists are Iran’s Shiite Iraqi foes, historically.
- The Iraqi army may revert to brutal Saddam-era tactics without American supervision.
The consensus in the US military, Ricks suggests, is that Americans will still be fighting in Iraq in 2015.
In the Nov. 19th New Yorker, John Lee Anderson concludes that “Iraq’s future, for the moment, is in limbo. The best one can say, perhaps, is that the U.S. has bought or borrowed a little space to work with.”
This is partly because the cause of the current decline in violence is not at all clear:
- The surge in American troops seems to be working, but only in some areas.
- On the other hand, “analysts credit much of the recent drop in Iraqi civilian deaths not to the surge but to Sadr’s decision, in August, to order the Mahdi Army, which is believed to have been responsible for much of the Shiite-on-Sunni sectarian killing in and around Baghdad, to “freeze” its activities for six months.”
- Also crucial is the fact that “the surge also coincided with the so-called Sunni Awakening, the decision by some Anbar tribesmen to ally themselves with the Americans and to fight against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia—a shift that was not foreseen in Petraeus’s plan.”
In other words, at least two of the elements of recent gains are not under American control at all, and thus subject to reversal, whatever future policies the US pursues.
In a harbinger of future instability, Anderson writes that “Many of the players in Iraq seemed …. to be positioning themselves for the next battle.” A Sunni leader now working with the US says, “Once Anbar is settled, we must take control of Baghdad, and we will.”
A second ominous sign is that, while the American relationship to various Iraqi players has shifted, internal Iraqi reconciliation is not proceeding, despite that being the central goal of the surge. Shiites in the Iraqi government feel the new Sunni “allies” that the US has enlisted are the militias of the future. Meanwhile, efforts to create nonsectarian security forces–essential to a post-occupation Iraq’s stability–are still faltering. The national police, for instance, are “still part of the problem,” an American officer tells Anderson.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that there is a way for things to suddenly get much worse in Iraq: a giant dam could collapse, releasing a 143-square-mile reservoir on the Tigris River. This would destroy much of the city of Mosul, which lies downstream, and could drown as many as 500,000 people.
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No one interviewed for the article ventures an estimate of probabilities for the event. Some Iraqi engineers are skeptical about the level of danger, while some American officials are said to think that “the dam could collapse any day.”
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.
The Iraqi Red Crescent relief organization and the UN have found that Iraqis continue to become internal refugees on a large scale–possibly 100,000 a month–and displacement may have accelerated since the US troop buildup began in February 2007, the International Herald Tribute reports.
For the moment, this vast movement of people is draining ethnically mixed areas in the center of the country, with Shiite refugees flowing toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis heading toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north. The demographic shifts could favor those who would like to see Iraq partitioned into three semi-autonomous regions: a Shiite south and a Kurdish north sandwiching a Sunni land in between.
This is another sign that scenarios of division are now more likely than those that include a unified Iraq.
Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress polled 108 foreign affairs experts across the political spectrum about terrorism and related issues.
Asked what country is likely to be the next al Qaeda stronghold, the experts said:
- Pakistan — 35%
- Iraq — 22%
- Somalia — 11%
- Sudan — 8%
- Afghanistan — 7%
The experts also put Pakistan at the head of the list most likely to transfer nuclear technology to terrorists by 2012:
- Pakistan — 74%
- North Korea — 42%
- Russia — 38%
- Iran — 31%
- United States — 5%
The experts were divided about how to change US policy toward Pakistan: about a third favored sanctions against the country, and a similar number advocated increasing US aid.
Pakistan likely tops both lists both because of ideological forces at work within the country, and because it is regularly cited as one of the states most likely to fall apart.
The Washington Post reported last week reported on wargames of Iraq’s future conducted for the American military.
The games suggested three outcomes:
Majority Shiites would drive Sunnis out of ethnically mixed areas west to Anbar province. Southern Iraq would erupt in civil war between Shiite groups. And the Kurdish north would solidify its borders and invite a U.S. troop presence there. In short, Iraq would effectively become three separate nations.
Other forecasts from the article:
- The games suggested that “partition would result” from a US pullout by a set date. “The games also predicted that Iran would intervene on one side of a Shiite civil war and would become bogged down in southern Iraq.”
- A retired Marine colonel “said that an extended Iranian presence in Iraq could lead to increased intervention by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states on the other side.” Iran might conclude that its best counterstrategy “‘would be to stimulate insurgency among the Shiites in Saudi Arabia.’”
- Most Middle East experts agree “that either an al-Qaeda or Iranian takeover [of Iraq] would be unlikely” in the aftermath of a US withdrawal; according to Anthony Cordesman of the CSIS in a recent report, al-Qaeda ‘does not dominate the Sunni insurgency.’
Two variables are central to future scenarios for Iraq: how unified or divided it is, and how the state or states are governed. These forecasts are another sign that the most likely future may be division along ethnic and sectarian lines.
