Democrats Must Offer A New Blueprint for Iraq

By Scott Ritter, AlterNet. Posted November 15, 2006.

With the dramatic victory of the Democratic Party in the recent mid-term elections, winning as it did a majority in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, there appear to be heightened expectations in many corners of the United States that this new Congress will be able to somehow act on the expectations of the American people and help President Bush chart a new policy course in Iraq. The resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, together with the appointment of the former CIA Director Bob Gates, represents a transition from ideology to pragmatism in a Defense Department torn apart by the ongoing debacle in Iraq. Mr. Gates not only represents a break from the Rumsfeldian past, but also brings with him his recent participation in the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan committee tasked with exploring new policy directions for the United States in Iraq.

The political astuteness of the decision by President Bush to replace Rumsfeld with Gates has escaped notice by many Democrats, who seem inclined simply to gloat over the demise of their archenemy. However, removing Rumsfeld not only eliminated an all-too convenient lightening rod for democratic angst over Bush's Iraq policies, but also, by putting Gates up in his stead, bought the Bush administration much needed political breathing room, as Gate's cannot be held accountable for policy failures he had nothing to do with either formulating or implementing. Indeed, given the fact that the Democrats have as of yet failed to articulate anything that remotely resembles a sound policy option regarding Iraq, instead falling back on the age-old tradition of criticizing without offering a solution of their own, a Gates controlled Defense Department will be almost untouchable from an oversight perspective, especially if Gates chooses to act on any of the policy options the Baker-led Iraq Study Group may recommend to the President.

It is imperative that the Democratic Party stake out a position on Iraq before the Iraq Study Group publicly announces its findings and recommendations.

This would enable the Democrats to enter into their mandated tasks of policy oversight from a position of strength, and not the exceptionally weak position they currently occupy. The American people, in voting in the Democrats, let their frustration over the current policy direction in Iraq manifest itself in real change. Lacking any policy option of their own, the Democratic Party could very well find itself in a position where it will have to accept any policy formulation put forward by the Iraq Study Group simply because it has nothing in its stead to offer. Any opposition to a change in policy direction put forward by the Iraq Study Group, regardless of justification, without a sound alternative to be articulated, will look more like political grandstanding than constitutionally mandated oversight, and will be frowned upon by an American electorate with such high hopes and demands.

What could a Democratic Iraq Strategy look like? Perhaps we should start from a position of what it should not look like. There is much talk about the wisdom of recognizing the inevitable, and accept that post-Saddam Iraq, as had been the case with the former Yugoslavia, is incapable of surviving as a unified nation state, and should be broken down into three basic sub-states, one for the Shi'a Arab majority, one for the Sunni Arab minority, and one for the Kurds. While this simplistic vision has its attractions (indeed, there are a number of esteemed American statesmen, Peter Galbraith, the former US Ambassador to Croatia, among them, who embrace such a concept, especially for the Kurds), it is in fact a plan totally devoid of reality. If the goal of breaking Iraq into three separate components is to reduce the likelihood of civil conflict, the fact is that in doing so the end result will be an environment even more conducive to internal strife that manifests itself violently.

The fact of the matter is that in Iraq today there is no homogeneous Shi'a, Sunni or Kurd community to draw upon in forming these theoretical ethnic/religious sub-states. The only one of the three which comes close to having a singular unifying national vision are the Kurds, and they are fatally split between competing political entities, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Peoples Union of Kurdistan (PUK). As recently as 1997 these two parties were engaged in an all-out civil war of their own, and the truce they have been pressured to consummate in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam is tenuous at best. The growing presence of a third Kurdish entity, the Turkish Kurdish Worker's Party, or PKK, in northern Iraq, brings with it the reality that America's NATO ally, Turkey, will never permit an independent Kurdish state to be carved out of Iraq (something the Turkish military has made quite clear to all parties involved). The fractures between Iraq's Kurds are so great, and their hold on unified governance so fragile, that any pressure brought to bear on the tenuous union between the KDP and PUK would result in its immediate dissolution and return to internecine violence, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

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Scott Ritter served as chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until his resignation in 1998. He is the author of, most recently, Target Iran (Nation Books, 2006) and Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (Nation Books, 2005).

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