Why Iraq? - benefits of dissolving the state of Iraq - Editorial

National Review, Oct 14, 1996

HALF a dozen years ago I began an article in NATIONAL REVIEW with the words, "Assuming, as one must (the alternative being too depressing to contemplate), that Saddam Hussein will be given his comeuppance . . ." But Saddam Hussein is still Caliph in Baghdad, his reputation undiminished, even enhanced, in the Moslem world as a champion of Islam against the accursed West.

What are we to make of the events of the past few weeks? Some three dozen cruise missiles fired into Iraq, half of which missed their targets; the CIA's operational base at Irbil, in Kurdish territory, abandoned in desperate haste; a hundred Kurdish operatives killed by Iraqi agents; and two thousand more hurriedly flown to Guam, en route to the United States. Irbil and Sulaimaniya are now in the hands of the Kurdish Democratic Party, whose leader, Masoud Barzani, has entered into some kind of unholy alliance with Saddam Hussein --which did not deter him from flying off to Ankara in mid-September to talk to Robert Pelletreau, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. To add to the confusion, the Arab states (with the impressive exceptions of Kuwait and Bahrain) have either kept silent or condemned the United States for its actions. And finally there was the U.S. aircraft carrier, rudely plucked, somewhat late in the day, from its placid anchorage off Cannes to head for the Gulf and . . . who knows what?

For the past 35 years Iraq has been nothing but trouble, either to its immediate neighbors or to the world at large. Witness, to mention only the highlights, its attempt to absorb Kuwait in 1961, its expropriation of the Iraq Petroleum Company a couple of years later, its bloody suppression and uprooting of the Kurds in the 1970s, its even bloodier war with Iran in the 1980s, and its invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Since the country is an artificial creation -- an amalgamation of the former Ottoman vilayets (provinces) of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul -- and since the southern half, from Baghdad to the Shatt al-Arab, is predominantly Shi'i Moslem in religion (ruled by a Sunni dictatorship in Baghdad), why not, as I have suggested before, contemplate its dismemberment? The northern half (the old vilayet of Mosul), with its substantial oil reserves, could go to Turkey, while the southern half, the former vilayets of Baghdad and Basra, could constitute a rump state, modestly sustained by the oil revenues from the Rumaila and Khaniqin fields. There are a thousand and one objections to such a proposal; but what else is to be done, apart from allowing things to drift on as they are, hoping and praying that Saddam Hussein will fall to an assassin's bullet and that his successor will be a man of wit, charm, grace, and boundless compassion?

It should not prove impossibly difficult to convince the Turks of the desirability of taking over northern Iraq and its oilfields. The Kurds, of course, are another matter, and one would be foolish to understate the difficulties of bringing them to an understanding with Turkey. But they must surely be aware by now, even if the realization is highly unpalatable, that after centuries of trying and failing to establish an independent Kurdistan, there is really no alternative for them other than eventual absorption into Turkey, Iran, or Iraq. The real question for the Kurdish leaders is which of these known devils they could live with. The choice must surely be Turkey.

To deprive the population of lower Iraq of the greater part of the country's oil reserves would not be as draconian as it may appear. A huge proportion of Iraq's oil revenues over the past thirty years has been wasted upon the megalomaniac follies of the country's Baathist rulers. There is no reason in the world why, given a relatively competent and minimally honest government in Baghdad, the Iraqis could not derive from the southern oilfields sufficient revenues to support them in the standard of living to which they have become accustomed. Then perhaps they, and their neighbors, might begin to enjoy some semblance of normalcy.