Geopolitical Discourse: A Conversation with Peter Galbraith about Iraq and State Building

November 24, 2004

Gerard Toal

During the 2000 presidential campaign, candidate George W. Bush declared that the United States should not use its military for what he called ‘nation-building.’ In the first presidential debate Bush declared:

"I think we've got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president [Al Gore] and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place…If we don't have a clear vision of the military, if we don't stop extending our troops all around the world and nation building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road, and I'm going to prevent that."

Running for re-election four years later with the United States deeply committed to state-building projects in Afghanistan and Iraq, the geopolitical discourse was the polar opposite. Bush spoke on the stump about the ‘transformational power of liberty’ and described freedom as a ‘gift from the Almighty.’ For example, in a campaign rally in Albuquerque New Mexico (which Bush ended up carrying by only a few thousand votes) he declared:

"During the next four years, during the next four years, we'll wage a comprehensive strategy to defend our country, and we will use every asset at our disposal. And one of the most powerful assets we have is freedom. (Applause.) Free nations do not breed resentment. Free nations do not export terror. Free nations become allies in the war against terror. By spreading freedom, we help keep the peace. I believe -- I believe in the power of liberty to transform societies… Freedom is on the march, and the world is better off for it.
I believe that everybody yearns to be free. I believe that mothers and dads want to raise their children in a free society. (Applause.) I believe all this not because freedom is America's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world. (Applause.)"

Crusading missionary rhetoric from a US President is not new – it is a staple part of the Wilsonian geopolitical tradition within US geopolitical culture – but the ‘state-building’ projects the president has committed the United States to as part of his global war against terror are daunting. Afghanistan, by many accounts, has never been a modern territorial nation-state. The country’s history is one of successful regional sectionalism in the face of centralizing state-building while loyalties are, beyond a thin veneer of intelligentsia, to qawm (local communal group) and kinship networks. Iraq, for many, is an ‘artificial state’ created by the French and British to serve their geopolitical ends. It functioned as a modern territorial state only because of authoritarian rule by a British appointed monarch and later by the Baathist Party and the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a ‘republic of fear’ that was never a unified nation. The minority Sunni Arabs controlled the state (with Saddam Hussein investing power even more narrowly in his own family and kinship network) while the southern Shiites and northern Kurds had their aspirations crushed.

As the 2004 presidential campaign reached its climax, Afghanistan’s first presidential election was concluded successfully with the American sponsored Pashtun leader, Hamad Karzai, duly elected president. Iraq, however, was in chaos, with daily bombings, kidnappings and fire fights between American troops, Iraqi soldiers and insurgents. Democratic candidate John Kerry sharply criticized President Bush for his handling of the invasion of Iraq and declared the conflict a diversion from the war on terror. Kerry, however, had voted to authorize the president to go to war should he deem it necessary. He was not calling for the United States to leave Iraq and did not appear to have a plan to end the fighting. An article on Kerry’s decision-making style and foreign policy thinking did, however, offer some clues about what he considered important. It cites Kerry interrupting his foreign policy advisor, Richard Holbrooke, saying: “Have you read Peter Galbraith’s article in the New York Review of Books? You got to read that, it’s very important.”

Peter Galbraith is a long time observer of Iraqi politics though he is not an academic area expert nor does he speak Kurdish or Arabic. The son of noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith, he first made a name for himself on Capitol Hill for his work in uncovering and documenting Saddam Hussein’s 1987/88 Anfal campaign against Iraq’s Kurds during which over 4000 Kurdish villages were destroyed and several hundred villages and towns—including the small city of Halabja—were attacked with chemical weapons. . Samantha Power’s Pulitzer prize winning book "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" tells the story of Galbraith’s struggle as an aide to Senator Claiborne Pell (Democrat, Rhode Island) to pass the ‘Prevention of Genocide Act’ that imposed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime in response to the Anfal campaign. After initial success, the legislation was thwarted by Congressional opponents responding to domestic constituents with economic interests in US trade with Iraq.

Galbraith had first visited Iraq on a congressional fact finding mission in 1984 and returned in September 1987, writing a Foreign Relations Committee Report that Power says reflected the conventional American geopolitical thinking on the Iran-Iraq war, with the Kurds as “rebels,” “insurgents” and “Iranian allies.” It was only when he read about the sustained chemical weapons attacks in 1988 that he began to grasp that the campaign amounted to genocide. With his colleague, Chris Van Hollen (now a Democratic Congressman from Maryland, re-elected in November 2004), he traveled to the Iraq-Turkish border to interview survivors of the chemical weapons attacks in order to prove definitively that they took place. He returned to a Washington mobilizing against his activism and saw the effort to impose sanctions on Iraq fail. Power notes that “[a]t no point during the eighteen-month Iraqi campaign of destruction did Reagan administration officials condemn it, and they did all they could to kill the Senate sanctions package.”

The election of a new president enabled Galbraith to draft another sanctions package, which passed the Senate in July 1990. As is well known, Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and was driven out by an international coalition in 1991. On 15 February 1991 George Bush, the elder, called on Iraqis “to take matters into their own hands” and force Saddam Hussein from power. Galbraith, by this time, was an important friend of the Kurds on Capitol Hill and he was invited to Kurdistan just as Kurdish groups were planning their revolt. He was there for 36 hours, just enough time to be caught up in Saddam Hussein’s counter-offensive against the Kurdish uprising. His video of fleeing Kurds led US newscasts on 1 April 1991 Seven days later, Secretary of State James Baker surveyed the desperate condition of displaced Kurds himself and decided that a response was needed. The result was ‘Operation Provide Comfort’ which established a northern ‘safe haven’ no-fly zone and allowed Kurdish families to return to their homes without fear of chemical attack from above by the Iraqi air force.

President Bill Clinton appointed Galbraith US Ambassador to the newly independent and partially Serbian occupied state of Croatia. There he was given the difficult task of managing US relations with the ultra-nationalist Franjo Tudjman whose antipathy for Muslims and proclivity for ‘clash of civilizations’ discourse made diplomacy challenging. Both Milosevic and Tudjman had designs on Bosnia-Herzegovina, which they saw as an ‘artificial state,’ and reportedly came to an agreement to divide it between them at Karadjordjevo in March 1992. US foreign policy effectively forced Tudjman to choose between assistance from the United States and dreams of a greater Croatia at the expense of Bosnia. Pragmatism won out over nationalist fantasy as Tudjman choose assistance from the United States. In February 1994, the Washington Agreement ended Muslim-Croat fighting in Bosnia. Washington made it possible for private US military contractors to build a modern Croatian army. The result was that the Croatian army easily routed the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs in 1995. In the process, this army ethnic cleansed Serbs from the Croatian and Bosnian krajina, the single largest instance of ethnic cleansing in the whole war. The Croatian army was the ground force that broke the stalemate of the Bosnian war and created the conditions for the peace settlement negotiated at Dayton. Galbraith mediated the Erdut Agreement (a companion to the Bosnia Dayton Accord) that finally ended the Croatia-Serbia War by providing for the peaceful reintegration of Serb-held Eastern Slavonia.

Galbraith was no stranger to controversy, and with Bob Dole challenging Clinton for the presidency in 1996, Dole’s Republican allies whipped up a ‘scandal’ about the Clinton administration supposedly giving a ‘green light’ to Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia via Croatia. An ‘Iran-contra’ style scandal was what the Republicans were trying to create. Galbraith was billed as a central protagonist for his role in allegedly allowing these arms shipments and thus an ‘Iranian foothold in Europe.’ Hauled before Congress and threatened with criminal prosecution, the attack on Galbraith foreshadowed the subsequent persecution of Bill Clinton. The theatre of the scandal, however, did not catch fire like the Republicans hoped and the ‘Green Light’ committee split along partisan lines producing separate majority and minority reports. Clinton won re-election with ease.

Galbraith served as US ambassador to Croatia until 1998. From 2000 to 2001, he served as a Director in the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), negotiating on behalf of the new state an agreement with Australia concerning the division of petroleum resources in an area of the Timor Sea claimed by both countries. Galbraith’s vigorous advocacy of the Timorese position antagonized Australian diplomats who wanted to preserve the 50/50 split that had prevailed in the area between Australia and Indonesia. The Timor Sea Treaty finally awarded 90% royalties to the East Timorese treasury from an area run jointly with Australia thus providing the fledging state with a needed revenue stream. Galbraith spent 2002 and 2003 as a Professor at the National Defense University in Washington DC.

As the administration of George Bush junior rolled out its campaign to invade Iraq and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz asked Galbraith to help promote the case for regime change. Wolfowitz argued that the exceptionality of Iraq’s repression made it immune to the anti-Western rhetoric characteristic of the Middle East and ripe for democracy. If democracy succeeded in Iraq, it would have a demonstration effect throughout the Middle East. Galbraith publicly supported the policy of regime change, endorsing the Bush administration’s use of his research on the Anfal campaign to help make the case for removing Hussein’s genocidal regime. Galbraith was a guest at the America- led effort to create a unified Iraqi exile opposition in London in December 2002. Galbraith was also in Baghdad days after it fell to American forces, working with ABC News. He returned in early 2004 and was in Kurdistan when twin suicide bombs killed over 200 people in Irbil.

As the Iraqi invasion gave way to an increasingly strained and desperate occupation of the country, Galbraith became an outspoken critic of how the Bush administration was handling Iraq. Galbraith laid out his argument in two widely read articles in the New York Review of Books (Kerry was referring to the second of these), media appearances, and a series of opinion editorials. The arguments he advanced are summarized in a very concise manner below (drawing upon geopolitical storyline analysis):

1. Situation Descriptions: From the Flowers of Liberation to the Sands of a Quagmire.

Galbraith argues that the US ‘liberated’ Iraq. Americans like himself were greeted with flowers (an iconic ‘liberation’ image that was much anticipated by the war boosters). Saddam Hussein’s regime was “one of the two most cruel and inhumane regimes in the second half of the twentieth century” (the other was Pol Pot’s regime). It conducted genocide against the Kurds and against the Marsh Arabs. Iraqis are much better off now that they were under the murderous Baathist dictatorship.

Galbraith rejects materialist and WMD explanations for the drive to war by the Bush administration. WMD was only a convenient rationale. The war was a project pushed by a group of Pentagon neoconservatives (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith with Cheney’s support) who saw a chance to transform the Middle East by replacing an anti-American dictatorship with a pro-American and Israeli-friendly democracy. Galbraith argues that this strategy was based on hope and not analysis of the realities of the Iraqi state. ‘A unified and democratic Iraq is an oxymoron.’ Given this, it is not clear why Galbraith supported the war, nevertheless.

The US military bungled the transition to democracy badly and now the United States faces a ‘near impossible dilemma’ in Iraq. The country, he argued on a radio show just before the election, has become a ‘quagmire’ (a description pushed by the Kerry campaign and the subject of one campaign commercial showing a US soldier sinking in sand). “Bush’s nation building has been ambitious, arrogant and incompetent. The war in Iraq is costing the United States money, military personnel and global influence. The opportunity costs include North Korea and Iran who are both actively developing their nuclear weapons capacity.

2. Causal Explanations: Why Iraq is in Chaos.

Galbraith advances two arguments as to why Iraq is in chaos. The first concerns Iraq as a geopolitical entity. Iraq, he claims, is an ‘artificial state’:

"The problems that threaten to tear Iraq apart – Kurdish aspirations for independence, Shiite dreams of dominance, Sunni Arab nostalgia for lost power – are not of America’s making (although the failure to act sooner against Saddam made them less solvable). Rather they are inherent in an artificial state held together for eighty years primarily be brute force."

The second argument is that the strategies adopted by the Bush administration after the invasion have made the situation worse. The US attempt to impose democracy from the top down was naïve. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) invested power in Americans only and American lawyers wrote the interim constitution. US strategies were ad hoc and “without the benefit of planning, adequate knowledge of the country, or the experience of comparable situations.” The personnel who ran the CPA were ideologues not professionals. The result is an ideological vision resting on a flawed geopolitical premise, namely on “an idea of an Iraq that does not exist. The fundamental problem of Iraq is the absence of Iraqis.”

This structural argument about the artificial nature of the Iraqi state distinguishes Galbraith’s storyline from others. The very grammar of the dominant storyline – the Iraqi state, Iraqi troops, Iraqi nation – is misleading. Washington is caught in a discourse that does not match the divided realities on the ground across the territory of Iraq.

3. Representing Threats and Dangers: Civil War and the Breakup of Iraq.

Galbraith’s storyline is distinguished also by what it represents as threats and dangers. In the administration’s storyline, coalition forces are fighting for democracy and freedom against ‘foreign terrorists’ and ‘old regime elements.’ Galbraith argues that the administration’s promotion of a unified majoritarian democratic state is itself a threat. The most important danger in Iraq is a looming civil war between Kurdish nationalism and Sunni majoritarianism. “Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more likely outcomes that a successful transition to a pluralistic Western-style democracy.” These groups are divided over language and the role religion should play in the everyday life of the state. The leaderless Sunnis, used to dominating Iraq, are in the middle and playing the role of spoilers. While there has been some cooperation between Sunni and radical Shiite insurgents in their battle against US occupation, this cooperation is limited by the bitter legacy of Saddam Hussein’s oppression of the Shiites during his reign. An urban struggle between different political identities for control of Baghdad and Kirkuk is also unfolding.

4. Conceptualizing US National Interests: The Confederation Option as a potential exit strategy for the United States.

Galbraith holds the position that “Iraq is not salvageable as a unitary state.” He argues that his experience in the Balkans convinced him that “it is impossible to preserve the unity of a democratic state where people in a geographically defined region almost unanimously do not want to be part of that state.” The Kurdish population overwhelmingly want independence and to not be a part of Iraq. An independent Kurdistan, however, is unacceptable not only to the Shiites and Sunnis but to Turkey because of the precedent it would establish. The Kurdish leadership knows this and is willing to settle for a constitution that legitimizes the autonomy they have created under the umbrella of the northern no-fly zone. Galbraith argues that the US should look to the possibility of a loose Iraqi confederation of three parts -- Kurdistan, the Sunni triangle and the Shia-dominated south – based on the confederalist model Yugoslavia was considering in the late 1980s. This is the only strategy to avoid the bloody breakup of Iraq. It is also “the only policy that can get American forces out of Iraq.” US acceptance of an autonomous Kurdistan and an Islamic ‘Shiastan’ in the south will allow local forces to establish structures of governance. The Sunni triangle, however, is another matter but elections and the promise of local autonomy could generate forces that might be able to establish order.

Iraq, for Galbraith, demonstrates the folly of the Bush doctrine of preventive war and the strategy of unilateralism. His argument echoed the Kerry campaign’s call for internationalizing the US’s involvement in the region while looking towards a US withdrawal from the state. Galbraith writes nothing about US plans to establish permanent bases in Iraq and appears not to accept that the United States needs to control Iraq because of its dependence on Middle East oil. Three enormous geopolitical issues – Israel, Iran and petroleum -- are strikingly absent from his reasoning.

I spoke with Galbraith in a neighborhood coffee shop in Washington on November 6th, four days after the defeat of the Kerry campaign for president. Below is an edited selection from our conversation:

GT: Why did you become interested in questions of states, refugees and US foreign policy?

PG: I have always been interested in foreign affairs. I started my government career in May 1979 working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Frank Church, D-Idaho was Chairman) and, as the new person, I got issues others didn’t think were important including refugees, international law, and environmental questions. This was just after the Vietnamese ousted Pol Pot and I was sent to the Thai-Cambodian border to look at the famine in Cambodia. It was a stark reminder that geopolitics can have devastating human consequences. It is a lesson I have never forgotten.

GT: You have been very critical of the ignorance of the Bush administration and officials in the Provisional Authority about Iraq. What is the state of knowledge about Iraq in the US foreign policy bureaucracy?

PG: Iraq was a hard country to get to know because Saddam Hussein restricted access and for much of his rule the US and Iraq did not have diplomatic relations. There is not a lot of professional expertise within the bureaucracy. Kenneth Pollack, for example, who was a CIA analyst and wrote a book advocating invasion, had never been to Iraq until after the fall of Baghdad. Then it was one of these Defense Department trips where one stays inside the American bubble. My experience of Iraq is different. I have never traveled in American circles but mostly with Kurdish friends. It is an entirely different perspective. The other problem is that America’s few Iraq experts tend to have an Arab and Baghdad-centric perspective. We don’t have people who speak Kurdish, for example. I tried to bring a different perspective to the almost endless Washington discussions (at the Pentagon and in think tanks) but no one wanted to hear that Iraq was a divided land. . I told them that I had never met an Iraqi Kurd who, if given a choice between Iraq and an independent Kurdistan, would want to be part of Iraq. It didn’t fit with the Washington group think and so it went in one ear and out the other.

GT: It seems that only when Saddam threatened to counter-attack Israel with chemical weapons if it attacked Iraq in April 1990 – the infamous ‘Burn Israel’ speech -- did the alarm bells go off about his regime in Washington. What was the role of concern for Israel in shaping your views of US Iraqi policy?

PG: Israel was not a major factor in my thinking about Iraq at that time or since. The Reagan and Bush Administrations saw Iraq as a possible strategic partner in the Gulf and an excellent opportunity for American business. I thought that a regime that: (i) launched a war of aggression on Iran, (ii) initiated the use of chemical weapons and, therefore, committed the first large scale violation of the 1925 Geneva Convention, (iii) that used chemical weapons extensively against its own people, (iv) that engaged in genocide, and (v) that had a Stalinist system was not going to be a reliable player in the region and could not be a strategic partner for the United States. There were moral reasons to oppose Saddam’s regime but strategic ones too. A regime that behaved as Iraq did could not be a reliable partner diplomatically or for business. I believe morality has an important place in foreign policy, but I also think the moral position often coincides with the strategically sound one. The US experience in Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s provides a very good example of why this is so.

GT: You supported the war yet you now argue that while Iraq is better off the United States is not. What lead you to discount the damage the war would do to the national security of the United States?

PG: I did not discount the damage but I never imagined that the Bush Administration would manage the post invasion period as incompetently as it did. I never thought that we would enter Baghdad without a plan to secure any of the city’s public institutions. I never imagined that the Administration would assume it had no responsibility for law and order. I never imagined that the Bush administration would turn the management of the occupation over to political cronies while pushing aside qualified professionals. I never thought that the Administration would have been unable to spend any significant part of the reconstruction funds for a full 18 months after taking over the country.

I had grave doubts about the extraordinary breadth of the Pentagon’s ambition in the early period when they were talking about a Germany or Japan type occupation in which we make Iraq into a model democracy. If we had managed the post war with a coherent strategy and a modicum of competence, I don’t think we would be in the mess that we are in now. But given where we are, there is no question but that the United States is much worse off for having gone to war. We have lost too many soldiers and wasted vast amounts of money. And we now don’t have the resources to deal with more serious national security threats like the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs. The nuclear non-proliferation regime is on the verge of collapse and we have no strategy to deal with the problem.

GT: You argue that Iraq is an artificial state. How is it more artificial than, say, Afghanistan? Can not all states be described as artificial constructs?

PG: God did not create any state. States are human creations. In that sense, all countries are artificial. But there are some very important distinctions. There are in Western Europe the so-called nation-states (e.g. France) where ethnic and territorial borders largely coincide. The Western hemisphere states have ethnic and religious diversity but have forged a common national identity associated with a geographic area (Americans, for example). Except for Canada, each Western Hemisphere state has a single language, even if the language was not that the original language of a large part of the population. I use the term ‘artificial’ to refer to the multiethnic states created after the collapse of empires, most especially after World War I. And they, typically, have not lasted: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. And Iraq is very much in that category.

Not all multi-ethnic states are doomed. India is a success because there is an Indian identity above the local identities. The same thing is true of Afghanistan. Both are multiethnic states, but also historical ones. Pakistan is a more modern artificial state, created only in 1947. It has already split once in 1971. I wonder how long the current Pakistan will hold together. The Sindis and Balochis are alienated, particularly by the Punjabi dominated military regimes that has run Pakistan for more than half its existence.

GT: Both you and Les Gelb point to Yugoslavia as a potential confederation model for Iraq. Is this really a useful model?

PG: Yugoslavia is an interesting model not for what happened but for what could have happened. Yugoslavia did not need to break up. It broke up because Milosevic and the Serbs were not willing to accommodate the Slovenian demand for a confederation and greater self-government. Had they done so, it is likely that Yugoslavia would still exist, admittedly as a loose confederation, and all of it would be in the European Union not just Slovenia. People forget that Yugoslavia was long considered the most western of the communist countries.

As long as nationalism is denied, it is of overwhelming importance. Once a people achieve their national aspirations, nationalism becomes less important. In 1991, Slovenia declared itself independent. Slovenians took great pride in their own flag, currency, passport, and license plates. But, the day after independence, they set their sights on joining the European Union which now means they are in the process of giving up their own currency for the Euro, putting the EU emblem on their license plates, replacing their passports with the EU version, and flying the EU flag next to the Slovenian flag. What Slovenians wanted so desperately in 1991, they are happily giving up in 2004 in order to join the European confederation.

The only real issue in Iraqi Kurdistan is nationalism and as long as it is denied, other issues won’t surface. But if Kurdish aspirations can be accommodated voluntarily in a loose Iraqi confederation, I suspect the Kurds will find reasons to cooperate with the other parts of Iraq. Right now, they refuse to allow central government ministries to operate in Kurdistan because they do not want to do anything that compromises their demands for self-government. But if they feel secure that Kurdistan’s self-government is fully recognized, then they are likely to see the advantage of cooperation with other Iraqis. Iraq is different from Yugoslavia in that the Kurdish desire to separate from the Arabs is not accompanied by any history of ethnic hatred. Americans, viewing Iraq through the prism of the Balkans, assume that separatism and ethnic hatred go hand and hand. Unfortunately, the very strategies that the US is using to build a unified Iraq – which will not work – are also creating ethnic hatred. The US has been using Kurdish units in Falluja and Samarra because these are reliable (even though none feel any loyalty to Iraq, a country many have fought against their entire adult life). The Sunni Arabs respond by threatening to go to Irbil to cut the throats of every Kurd they encounter.

GT: How do you respond to the criticisms that your confederation plan (i) dooms the Sunni triangle to be a geopolitical ‘black hole’ (ii) doesn’t account for Shiite desire to control all of Iraq and (iii) that a de facto independent Kurdistan will provoke a Turkish invasion?

PG: The choice is between all of Iraq being a ‘black hole’ or the region between Kurdistan and ‘Shia-stan’ being a ‘black hole.’ My plan does not create a black hole in the center. That already exists. In the worse case scenario, my plan limits the black hole to the center. I also believe my plan offers the Sunni Arabs a way out of that black hole. Today Sunni Arabs feel that others--Americans, Shiites, Kurds—determine their future and this sense of not being in control helps fuel the insurgency. My plan offers Sunni Arabs the possibility of controlling their own destiny and territory. Second, the pershmerga and Shiite militias can counter the most extreme tendencies in the Sunni Arab lands. They will intervene, if necessary, to prevent extremist Sunni fundamentalist or Arab nationalists from becoming too strong or too dangerous. The Kurds and Shiites can help deter too aggressive extremism in the Sunni triangle.

The Bush administration’s plan conceives of constitution writing as a majoritarian exercise which is wrong. Any constitution has to be accepted by the Kurds and Sunni Arabs, as well as the Shiites. As a practical matter, the Shiites do not have the power to impose their will on Kurdistan. The Kurds have a much larger army and they also have allies, particularly the United States. It is not just that the Shiites should not run all of Iraq; they cannot run all of Iraq. It is impossible.

There are two reasons why I favor confederation over the absolute breakup of Iraq. The first is the attitude of Turkey. Turkey at this stage is not prepared to accept an independent Kurdistan. But Turkey has its own constraints. One of them is military. It took Turkey 15 years to defeat the PKK which consisted of 15,000 guerillas operating inside Turkey. It is much more formidable military challenge to take on the Kurds of northern Iraq. There is also the European Union factor. I was with Nerchivan Barzani [Kurdistan Prime Minister] when the news came that Turkey had been admitted to begin accession talks. I told him “This is one of the most important days in Kurdish history.” As long as Turkey is on the EU accession track, it will have to be on good behavior in Iraq. The Cyprus experience is another reason Turkey will be reluctant too intervene. It took two weeks to invade, but thirty years later Turkey is still there. Turkish opinion is not as one-dimensional as it is sometimes portrayed. Yes, there is an element in the ‘deep state’ opposed to anything Kurdish. But there are also those, including some in the Turkish army, who see secular Kurdistan as a buffer against an Islamic Iraq. Remember, the Turkish Republic is founded on two core principles: one is ‘Turkishness,’ and the other is secularism. There is also a civil rights movement for Kurds inside Turkey. One consequence of empowering Kurds politically is that Turkish politicians stop seeing the Kurds as the enemy but as one of their own people. And, therefore, the Kurds in Iraq are cousins. It is like white politicians in the United States who, once the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, stopped seeing blacks as ‘enemies’ and starting seeing them as ‘constituents.’

The second reason I prefer confederation to fully breaking up Iraq is that drawing lines –and settling territorial issues—will be difficult enough in the context of one Iraq. It will be extremely difficult in the context of creating sovereign states. But, this does not mean full independence for Kurdistan will never happen. I see it as a real possibility in the next decade.

GT: Your confederation option for Iraq is a sort of ‘cartographic fix’ for the conflict in the country but where will the borders of these statelets be drawn and by whom? And what happens to the multi-ethnic cities like Kirkuk and Baghdad?

PG: Iraq has already broken up. Trying to undo the break up is what will lead to violence. I am simply acknowledging what has already happened. Iraq is multiethnic but not a melting pot. Baghdad is home to Sunni Arabs, Shiites, Kurds, Turcomans and Christians but they do not live together for the most part. They each have their distinct parts of the city. The same is true in Kirkuk and Mosul. The Tigris river divides Kurdish east Mosul from Arab west Mosul and there is not a lot of interaction.

It is complicated drawing lines, however. The second reason why I am not supporting Kurdish independence is the greater potential for conflict that comes with this independence. Confederalism allows people to have the same passport and travel easily between entities but in all other regards be independent. It makes it easier to solve the problem of Kirkuk, of East Mosul (which is not going to be part of Kurdistan), and easier for the minority populations in Baghdad.

The situation is different from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union where the constituent republics had legally defined borders that facilitated separation. This has not historically been true in Iraq. The Transitional Administrative Law (Iraq’s interim constitution) does define Kurdistan as the area controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government on the day the war began, i.e. 19 March 2003. This is a good start for creating a confederal unit, but there are several non-controversial territorial adjustments that should be made. These include moving Kurdistan’s borders west of Irbil to Makhmur, moving them south to include Khaniqin, and some adjustments in the Dahuk area. Then there is Kirkuk, which is very controversial. This is a fundamental issue for the Kurds: they call it their ‘Jerusalem’ but they need to think this through. Getting Kirkuk is also buying a lot of trouble: buying trouble with Turkey because of the ethnic Turkomens who live in the city, buying trouble because of the Arab population. One solution is to entrench power sharing in the city and give Kirkuk a special status. Baghdad certainly should be its own confederal unit. The Kurds say they are prepared to allow the central government to manage Kirkuk’s oil as long as the oil in the rest of Kurdistan – undeveloped so far – is controlled by them. In any confederation, there should be revenue sharing among the regions, where the oil rich regions transfer funds to the other regions. Incidentally, there are probably very substantial amounts of oil in all three regions. But in the next fifteen years there should be distribution from the south to the other two regions.

GT: Your argument could be described as realist at the scale of Iraq but at the larger scale of the neighborhood, the centralized state policy is supposedly realist in that it seeks to have a strong Iraq as a counter-weight to a strong Iran in the region. There is an argument that Brent Scowcroft, Bush the elder’s National Security Advisor, did not want to topple Saddam precisely for this reason after the first Gulf War. Doesn’t your plan end up helping Iran in the region?

PG: If the Administration was concerned about Iranian influence, they should have thought about it before they invaded Iraq. The administration says that the elected national assembly should decide the future of all of Iraq. Since the pro-Iranian Shiite parties are likely to have an absolute majority in that Assembly, their plan in effect turns the entire country over to pro-Iranian elements. My plan limits the pro-Iranian region of Iraq to the south. Of course, Kurdistan will never accept control by a Shiite dominated central government (or by any central government) so recreating a strong Iraq is not possible.

The defenders of the first President Bush have been clever in framing the debate on his decision to leave Saddam in power in 1991. They put forward the arguments against sending US troops to Baghdad, a decision that looks particularly good in light of what has happened. But the real travesty was George Bush’s decision to abandon the uprising that began on March 2, 1991—an uprising he had publicly called on the Iraqi people to start. This had nothing to do with sending US troops to Baghdad. Saddam could have been overthrown in March 1991 if the US had used its airpower to stop the Iraqi counter-attack on the rebels. At that time, a post Saddam Iraq might have survived as a unitary state. But, the Bush Administration “realists” were afraid that the success of the Shiite uprising in the south would result in undue Iranian influence while the Kurdish uprising could lead to an independent Kurdistan. As a result, the first Bush Administration sat on their hands while Saddam Hussein’s forces massacred more than one hundred thousand people, many in sight of American troops still on Iraqi soil. And what was the ultimate result? There has been an independent Kurdistan for 13 years while Iran has great influence in the south and in Baghdad. As I said before, the moral choice coincides with our strategic interest more than most people assume.

GT: Should the US have permanent bases in Iraq and what are the US’s larger strategic interests? Why is there no discussion of petroleum in your analysis?

PG: I think we should consider bases where we are welcome, which is in Kurdistan. It would provide some security for that region and would enable us to re-intervene if a Taliban-al Qaeda like entity developed in the Sunni triangle. And it would also be a check on the Shiite majority.

I do not see oil as our primary strategic interest. Our top priority is that Iraq not be a base for al Qaeda and others planning to attack the United States. We also want to be sure that Iraq does not re-start a weapon of mass destruction program. Our overriding interest is that our preoccupations with Iraq not distract us from the very real danger that the global nuclear non-proliferation regime will collapse. Unfortunately, that seems to already be happening.

I do not believe that the invasion was about oil. First, the oil has to be exported no matter who is in power. Second, American oil companies do not seem to be queuing up to take over the oil fields (maybe this will change after the January elections). In fact, the only people who have begun to privatize the oil fields are the Kurds who have made deals with Turkish and Norwegian oil companies. Otherwise, Iraq’s oil remains under the control of the Iraqi national oil company. What is true is that the Bush administration has allocated billions to favored companies – the no-bid contracts to Halliburton – and has given important jobs in Iraq to political cronies rather than Foreign Service officers and other professionals. But this is US taxpayer dollars that is being siphoned off to political favorites, not Iraqi resources. Of course, they do the same thing with US domestic legislation. A tax bill today is primarily about rewarding friends and punishing enemies.

GT: What is the role of Israel in shaping US foreign policy?

PG: What Israel seeks to avoid is neighbors with nuclear weapons. The truth is that Israel’s security was probably better assured in that regard before the invasion than afterwards. With the inspection regime in place before the war began, there was no way that Iraq could possess or develop nuclear weapons.

The problem for Israel was not Iraq’s nuclear program but Iran’s. The Bush administration’s mishandling of the post-war has resulted in so many US resources being tied down in Iraq---army divisions, money and political capital--that the Iranian leadership believes that the US has neither the political will or the resources to stop them. At the end of the day, the war has left Israel much less secure.

GT: What will 2005 look like in Iraq?

PG: The elections have set Iraq on the road to civil war. They will produce a Shiite majority and it will be resisted by the Kurds and whatever Sunni Arab participation there is. It will require extraordinary diplomatic interventions to keep that from happening. In Kurdistan there is a lot of popular resentment against their leadership for making too many concessions. But the attitude of the Kurdish leadership is that they don’t want to be the ones that cause Iraq to fail. But they fully expect Iraq to fail.

GT: What are the lessons, in your experience, that the United States needs to learn about state-building?

PG: First, it is extremely difficult and success is always relative. It requires professionals--who know the region, speak the local languages. It also requires people who have professional experience in their substantive area: finance, judicial reform, electricity. Second, nation building is not something that the United States does particularly well. The real expertise lies with the United Nations. There is, however, no cadre of people in the world who can be deployed to do nation building. It is necessarily ad hoc and it is always hard to get good people to work in the tough and dangerous locations where nation building usually takes place. Third, nation building is best done neutrally, another advantage of the UN which is not seen as serving one particular country. Fourth, it is absolutely critical that nation builders turns over power to the people of the country as quickly as possible and not try to do everything themselves. Political transitions have to be run by the people of the country free from foreign involvement. No foreign written constitution, for example, will ever be accepted, no matter how meritorious. This was one of the problems with Iraq’s much vaunted interim constitution, which was drafted by American lawyers and abandoned in the face of Shiite opposition. Fifth, the internationals need to stick to the principles of international law. Sixth, living conditions in a country must quickly improve. No matter how grateful they are for the foreign intervention, after about six months people will start asking ‘why don’t I have a job?’ etc. You really have got to quickly spend money. And again, that is another failure of Iraq. Seventh, from the outset law, order and security need to be the first priority. We lost Iraq when we allowed the systematic looting of Baghdad. If we had anticipated it, and it was predictable, if we had guarded 50 government ministry buildings, people would have been able to return to work. As it happened, it took months before government officials could return to work. We conveyed an image that we were not in control. And the insurgents have exploited that. Finally, nation builders have to plan. The Bosnian deployment worked because it had been planned for years. The people who went there were professionals (there was only one political appointee). We stuck to our principles. We didn’t assert our authority as strongly as we should have but eventually we got it right, Admiral ‘Snuffy’ Smith, the first NATO military commander made an early mistake in allowing departing Serbs to burn the Sarajevo suburbs. But, we learned and the errors of Bosnia are nothing as compared to the endless screw ups of this administration in Iraq. Also, they never seem to learn.

[End transcript]

The debate over Iraq in the United States is likely to become even more intense as chaos persists and causalities rise. Former supports of the war, like Robert Kaplan, have conceded that democratization may be a ‘bridge too far’ and cite ‘a legacy of history and geography’ for the failure. However, former Provisional Authority employees like constitutional law professor, Noah Feldman, argue that the United States can still, under the right conditions, play an ‘impartial mediation’ role between the different factions and that US withdraw could lead to civil war. Whether these ‘honest broker’ and ‘indispensable nation’ assumptions are realistic judgments or imperial delusions will be determined in the coming year.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

Many thanks to Peter Galbraith for being open to discussion about Iraq, state-building and his experience. Thanks also to Sabine Durier for editing suggestions.

Dr. Gerard Toal is a professor in the Department of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Alexandria Campus. This article is forthcoming (with notes) in Geopolitics 10, l (copyright Taylor and Frances) in Spring 2005