Daniel Starr: No Government in Iraq -- and That's Good News

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March 30, 2005

No Government in Iraq -- and That's Good News

The Iraqi National Assembly keeps failing to form a government for the country. This is backhanded good news: it means the leading Iraqis are confident that Iraq's insurgency is dwindling.

The winners of the Iraqi elections -- the Kurds and the moderate Shiites -- both have reason to take their time before cutting a deal. The Kurdish leaders want de facto independence for the Kurdish provinces -- and guess what? They already have de facto independence for the Kurdish provinces. They'd like Kirkuk annexed to the Kurdish provinces, too, but that's just a bonus. The Kurds have been self-governing ever since the United States forced Hussein to withdraw from northern Iraq after the original 1991 Gulf War. Every month that goes by without an overall Iraqi government is another month that the Kurds get to continue having their goal -- an almost total independence.

The moderate Shiites, for their part, have reason to wait for as long as it looks like the insurgency is fading, because the more peaceful the country is, the more the Shiite Arabs -- who make up perhaps 60 percent of Iraq's population -- can insist on having their way as the majority, as opposed to making concessions to the Kurds -- or, especially, the favored folk under Saddam Hussein, the Sunni Arabs.

But both Kurds and moderate Shiites would lose in a civil war: that would hand power to the radical Shiites like al-Sadr, and make mixed-ethnicity cities like Mosul or Kirkuk into slaughterhouses like Sarajevo during the Serb-Muslim-Croat wars of Yugoslavia/Bosnia in the 90s. So if the Iraqi politicians are being slow to get their act together, that tells us they think the insurgency is fading, civil war is not going to happen, and the insurgents are eventually going to settle for an "exit strategy" of peaceful politics.

And the Iraqi political leaders are probably a lot better judges of the insurgents' strength than most American soldiers, journalists or politicians.

Of course, the Iraqi politicians could be overconfident: in the 1850s, few American politicians believed the United States would fall into civil war, and so they refused to compromise with each other on slavery. And we all know exactly how that turned out.

[E1] Added link to Beltway Traffic Jam.

Posted by danielstarr at March 30, 2005 12:42 PM

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