Property of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; unedited;

Tim Shah: The final challenging case of ethnic conflict for U.S. foreign policy we address in today’s symposium is that of Iraq. Specifically our topic is making ethnic peace after Saddam. I suspect the topicality and the importance of this subject need no introduction or elaboration. We are very grateful that two very fine outstanding experts on precisely this issue have agreed to join us.

Our first speaker is Dr. Kanan Makiya who is currently professor of Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University. Professor Makiya born in Baghdad left Iraq to study architecture at MIT and has had a fascinatingly circuitous career ever since. He later returned to the Middle East to join Makiya Associates to design and build projects. In 1981 he left the practice of architecture to write a book "Republic of Fear, the politics of modern Iraq". He has written many other fascinating works, history, fiction. He has written widely for many publications. According to a New York Times story by Judith Miller that appeared on Sunday, Dr. Makiya was one of a handful of Iraqi dissidents who participated in the meeting with the President Bush last Friday to talk about a post-Saddam Iraq. We are delighted that Professor Makiya could be with us.

Kanan Makiya: Thank you Timothy and Dr. Fradkin for inviting me here today. I can not think of more relevant and timely topic than the subject of this conference from an Iraqi point of view. And as a kind of way of entry into this topic, I will begin with a little anecdote about a debate that is raging today in the Arabic press or the Quality press coming out of London that started with an extraordinary personal attack on my by Mr. Edward Said of Columbia University, which was published in the Arabic daily al-Hayat on December 3rd of last year. Now the odd thing about Mr. Said’s initiative in writing this article is that we have not crossed swords in public for at least eight years. So what on earth could have occasioned this piece? Reading between the lines (because most of it is personal and just utterly beside the point) it appears that he has taken great offense at two ideas I first proposed in public at a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in this town last October and later included in a document that was submitted to the London Conference of the Iraqi Opposition in December, a document that was entitled "Transition to Democracy in Iraq". These ideas concern the reshaping of the future state of Iraq on a non-ethnic and federal basis, ideas which I argued necessarily implied that this future Iraqi State would have to be a "non-Arab state". Well, Mr. Said took enormous offense at all of this which he labels a fantasy of the American State Department, whose stooge I am supposed to be, beavering away in some basement office in the State Department building, as he so colorfully puts it. Would that any of that were even half-true. In fact, the State Department has labored hard to distance itself from me and the whole "Transition to Democracy" report. And individual officials did everything they possibly could to undermine that report during the recent conference of Iraqi opposition. Fortunately, I have not had to reply to Mr. Said because his comments stirred up a hornet’s nest of anger amongst Iraqis who quite correctly read his article as an attack on them and their opposition to the current regime in Baghdad. Their articles, seven alone in Hayat and I don’t know how many in Sharq al-Awsat are appearing virtually every other day in one form or another on the pages of different Arabic newspapers.

Now unlike Said’s diatribe, the debate that has ensued is clearly focused on substantive questions to do exactly with the themes of this conference: ethnicity and the kind of federalism that might or might not work in the future Iraq post-Saddam. So I am going to use one of the best contributions critical of my position by the Lebanese writer, Hassan Mouneimne, who asks in his, in a December 29th of issue of Hayat. Why even begin, as Iraqi oppositionists tend to do, by assuming that a federal system is the best solution to the problems of the Iraqi state? After all, he says, there are all kinds of other ways to decentralize and each time that a formally centralized state has attempted to make the transition to a federal system—Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, perhaps Czechoslovakia—the experiment has clearly failed. Federalism works best, he argues, when it is a matter of uniting already constituted fragments into a larger entity—obviously United States, Switzerland and even perhaps the United Arab Emirates—not when it is a matter of desegregating an already constituted polity.

Now there is a great deal in Mouneimne’s argument. And the case he has marshaled constitutes I think the most serious challenge to the idea of federalism as applied to Iraq since this idea was first adopted by the Kurdish parliament in 1992, followed very shortly there after by the Iraqi National Congress at its very important meeting in Salaheddin in northern Iraq in 1992. Since those two, that seminal year when these two decisions were taken for a federal Iraq, I would say that the word federalism, by which people of course mean all sorts of different things, has become a staple of Iraqi opposition politics. It is simply taken for granted by Iraqis in opposition that the future post-Ba’ath State would be in some sense or another federal. Now the fact is that many people have very little knowledge of what that word exactly means or have very different interpretations of what it might mean. But none the less, I think the novelty at the moment, the idea, exists, is floating there and is commonly accepted in political parlance and that represents a major departure with Arab politics in general. We are dealing with a new idea, with the rupture in the basic discourse of the Arab political discourse since 1967. Gone is the language of liberation-struggle to be replaced by new words, new categories, which of course still have to be flushed out and given concrete meaning.

Now, Mouneimne correctly points out the numbers of ways in which a federalist approach to the problems of Iraq might fail, the risks of it and so on. And reviewing them, I would say that I would go further perhaps even than he has in that article to say that there is really only one very powerful argument for trying to make the attempt to tailor the idea of federalism to Iraqi conditions in the post-Saddam period. And that is to keep the Kurdish people inside Iraq as Iraqis and not in the form of a people who because of their very particular history are forever straining to separate and establish their own state. Now if I am wrong in this assessment and it turns out, for instance, a national referendum during the transition period in Iraq, that the Kurdish people are not particularly anxious to separate and this is still something to be tested, and that in fact the whole issue of federalism is a kind of nationalist power-grab by Kurdish political parties, than the case for federalism folds it seems to me. And along with it my ten year long defense of the idea, which began with a speech I made on the subject in the Salahadid conference that I mentioned before of the Iraqi National Congress.

Now somehow, I do not think that such a referendum among Kurds will produce such surprising results. Federalism has of course profound implications for all Iraqis. But it is an idea driven originally by the whole Kurdish experience in Iraq. And while I am sure that it has been and will continue to be exploited for all sorts of crass political purposes, on some fundamental level, I suspect, it genuinely corresponds to how most Kurds wish to resolve the dilemma of their political identity in a future Iraq. My reasoning, in other words, is not academic or abstract. It is strictly political and concrete, though it derives also perhaps from emotional well springs deep inside of me that wish to preserve the variegated mosaic-like texture of the society that I grew up in and learned to love and that sees in federalism perhaps a good way of doing so. But the beginning in Iraqi conditions surely must be not to think of federalism as a synonym for division and weakness. If it can be made to work in Iraq, it must take distance from its origins in ethnic oppression to become a force for unity and strength of the country as a whole. Anything else it seems to me is tantamount to undermining the territorial integrity of Iraq—something that no Kurdish leader is claiming he wants to do. Now as the idea is developed in the report on the "Transition to Democracy in Iraq", federalism is placed at the center of a new complete vision of the future Iraqi State. And the paragraph that bests sums this up, I will now quote for you. "Federalism," the report says, "is the thin end of the wedge of democracy in Iraq. It is the first step towards a state system, resting on the principle that the rights of the part, or the minority should never be sacrificed to the will of the majority. The fundamental principle of human rights"—perhaps I should use the word individual rights as Professor Krakowski correctly pointed out—"is that the rights of the part, be that part defined as a single individual or a whole collectivity of individuals who speak another language and have their own culture, are inviolable by the State." Federalism is about the rights of those collective parts of the mosaic that is Iraqi society. Majority rule is not the essence of a federal democracy; minority rights, or the rights of the part, including ultimately individual human rights, are.
Now there is something rather idealistic—perhaps some of you will say, hopelessly idealistic—about this formulation. Fair enough. I accept the criticism, if that is indeed what it is. I accept it because ideals and dreams are the stuff Iraqis are most in need of these days. Without them, you can not build a new country out of the raw materials Saddam Hussein has bequeathed to us. Iraq is about to be granted the opportunity to make a new beginning, and granted it by the United States. Perhaps even this is a new beginning for all the peoples of the Middle East, as the President himself is inclined to think. But a country that is as afflicted as Iraq needs a dose of idealism large enough to make its own populace start to believe in themselves once again. Without a belief in our own capacity to rise above our own past, the new page that is about to open in Iraq could very easily—whether we like it or not—end up being as dark if not darker than the one preceding it. Of this I am certain, however idealistic and utopian I may be in all sorts of other things and other ways. Now the work of a number of conscientious Iraqis on the future of their country in recent months has largely been about designing the framework of such a new beginning. We seek to re-imagine this idea of Iraq in practical and inevitable ways that retain the attribute of unity and diversity, which we consider the essence of the new Iraq, an essence that must at all costs be preserved and find a political expression of some sort. In other words, Iraqis, we think, are in need of or in search of a positive uplifting political idea that they can once again fall in love with. Such an idea cannot take the shape of a nostalgia for the days of the monarchy or for the more distant golden years of Turkish-Ottoman civilization or Abbasid civilization in Baghdad. Even less can it be nostalgia for ancient empires like Babylon, although there are communities in Iraq that treasure and build upon these moments of Iraq’s past above all others. But the way of Iraqi democrats has surely got to be different. We choose to look to the future, not the past, and to the example of the West and more particularly to the example of these United States.

Now what exactly is this thing that we Iraqis seek to re-imagine today? There are those who see Iraq as nothing more than a peculiarly shaped piece of geography cobbled together by the great powers a century or so ago. I choose to disagree. Iraq is a piece of geography and it is an idea, with the potential to uplift us, as I said, to impel us forward politically. The problem is to rediscover that idea. For there once were the seeds of such an idea that lived among the men and women of my father’s generation and mine was the generation that did away with that. We who believed in great all embracing ideologies of one sort of another: Nationalism, Socialism, Marxism and more recently political Islamism. These were the great ideologies that so gravely damaged or tarnished the centrality of the idea of Iraq during the 1960’s and 70’s. And as they did their terrible work, they planted the seeds of the exclusionary spirit, which still haunts and inhabits many different parts of the Iraqi opposition, Saddam Hussein. Now towering above all these pernicious "isms" and their destructiveness are various forms of ethnic nationalism and religious sectarianism pioneered at the hands of the Ba’ath to be sure, but reasserted more recently in the mirror reflections of that Arab nationalist ideology, reflections that take the shape today of Kurdish, Turkmen and Assyrian nationalisms. This kind of nationalism, not patriotism, is the great scourge — I put it to you — of the Middle East. If we let it set the agenda of our new federal Iraq, then indeed Mouneimne’s fears and worries could become the basis for an even darker page in the history of Iraq than the one that has preceded it. For federalism to work in Iraq, it seems to me, it must build on what I called in a recent article in al-Hayat, the "Iraqiness" of Iraq: love of Iraq as a whole entity needs to be elevated somehow politically over all forms of identity politics.

From these considerations — general I admit — flow the following observations about federalism in Iraq. First, it seems to me that no Iraqi should ever again think of using force to keep the Kurds inside Iraq. That solution was tried and carried to the ultimate extreme of genocide in the shape of the Anfal operations. And yet still it failed. Political persuasion is the only alternative to force. And if the Kurds cannot be persuaded, if they have adopted federalism not because they really want it as a people, but because the regional situation does not allow them to succeed and have their own separate state carved out of northern Iraq, then so be it. I for one wish them well and will support them in this new adventure, however unwise I may think it to be from even the point of view of Kurdish self-interest. Second, it seems to me that no federal system can be built in Iraq on the basis of accepting the de facto situation on the ground today in Iraqi Kurdistan. The current boundaries created by the arbitrary designation of the safe haven areas in 1991 and the balance of power arrangements between the KDP, the PUK and the Iraqi regime must be rethought on a rational and strictly administrative basis along with the whole rest of Iraq with the explicit intention it seems to me of not consecrating ethnicity as the basis for territorial divisions. Third, the Kurdish militias, or Pershmurga, must be brought around to the idea of disarming themselves during the transitional period as part of course of the whole internal security package to do with the redesign of all the law and order infrastructures of the new Iraqi state. Disarmament must be accomplished by the Kurdish organizations themselves. Otherwise there is a real danger that the Americans or the Turks will do it by force and that I think will be a grave catastrophe for Iraq. Certainly I do not think any Iraqi-Arab should be involved in this, given the terrible legacy of Kurdish suffering at the hands of Saddam. The fourth important consideration for federalism in Iraq is that law and order in a future federal state must involve local agencies at the level of the region, which of course in regions dominated by Kurds will be no doubt overwhelmingly Kurdish, and a single all-powerful, all-Iraqi federal policing agency with powers to act inside the regions in pursuit of constitutionally proscribed criminal activity. Fifth, a future federal system must be based on completely open borders—this, I take for granted, with no border control points and total freedom of movement for people and capital between regions. The various regional parliaments should not have the authority to pass any laws obstructing individual ownership and the completely unimpeded movement of capital and people across these regional boundaries. These are, it seems to me, the minimum ground rules for making federalism work in Iraq. And there are many individual Kurds who I know are in support of them. Some of the major organizations are not and others are wavering. We have spelled out many other details in the "Transition to Democracy" document, which I submit to you as so far the only thought out, if incomplete, plan for a future Iraqi state.

What is sorely missing at the moment is the beginning of a dialogue between Kurdish experts and professionals, who at the behest of their parties drew up the draft constitution for a federal Iraq that currently exists and that is going up along ethnic lines, and the authors of the "Transition to Democracy" document who reject such an approach. And such a dialogue—which is something I intend to initiate when I go to the conference of the Iraqi opposition in Northern Iraq and which I’ve been in discussion with the Kurdish leaders about—could go along way to the development of a common all-Iraqi position on this thorny issue of federalism.

There remains one final point that I would like to make in response to irresponsible critics like Mr. Edward Said. It concerns the greatly misunderstood idea I have espoused of a non-Arab Iraq. It seems to me this idea is the logical corollary of asking my fellow Kurdish citizens in the future to not think of federalism in ethnic terms. The nationalism to which I ascribe most of the ills of the Arab Middle East is what Hannah Arendt in her analysis of totalitarianism described as tribal nationalism. This form of nationalism is most certainly not the love of country or state, otherwise known as patriotism. I extol the latter in the very concrete conditions of fragmented Iraq today, whereas I fear all political manifestations of the former, seeing them as I do as undermining ultimately the integrity of Iraq as an idea and as a country.

One distinction between these two is that whereas tribal nationalism is a sentiment unrelated to a concrete, already existing polity, and therefore relates to Kurdish nationalism in general as much as it relates to pan-Arab nationalism, patriotism assumes an already existing entity, namely Iraq, to which one owes a primarily political form of allegiance. If I might put it for a second in personal terms, in relation to all matters political concerning my rights and obligation, as a citizen of the future state of Iraq, I want to be thought of first and foremost and always as only an Iraqi. But in relation to my culture and background and whole model and ethical formation as a human being, I am always an Arab of Shi’ite Muslim heritage, who happens also to have lived in the West for a very long time and has absorbed many of its values. If one were to generalize this self-perception into political terms, it is an argument—again to repeat myself—for the centrality of the idea of Iraq in politics. But it is not in any way a degeneration of Arabness or Islam in society and culture. In fact, it is an elevation, I would say, of the importance of these in terms of the moral and spiritual formation of individual human beings. Politics after all is but one small component of who we are. Keeping it separate from other dimensions of identity and personality is a necessary and good thing, and only totalitarians normally refuse to make this separation. When I realized, however, during the recent conference of the Iraqi opposition, that it was not the Arabs but the Kurds who were most against this formulation of a non-Arab Iraq, seeing it as they did (and this is very ironic and very paradoxical) as undermining the very thing they had finally succeeded in getting after so many years of struggle, namely an assertion of Kurdish identity, I was frankly shocked to my very foundations. Here was an idea that had been coined to facilitate the emergence of a non-ethnically based idea of federalism in Iraq. But as it turned out, during the December conference, the greatest defenders of ethnicity—sadly I might add for me at any rate—as a basis for federalism were the very core Kurdish organizations I was hoping to draw into a dialogue on the future shape of the Iraqi State. And I am still thinking through the consequences of this state of affairs, and frankly I plan to take it up with the Kurdish leadership at the next meeting of the Iraqi opposition where it will become a very important issue of discussion. Thank you very much.

Mr. Shah: Our next speaker is Dr. Patrick Clawson, Deputy Director for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He was co-convener of its 2000-2001 Presidential Study group, which issued the report "Navigating through Turbulence: America and the Middle East in a New Century". He has produced many articles, books, and monographs. The most recent monograph is "How To Build a New Iraq After Saddam," published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in 2002. Dr. Clawson is also senior editor of Middle East Quarterly.

Patrick Clawsom: Well I could not begin to address the issues of federalism with respect to Iraqi domestic politics with the skill and insight that Kanan has done. And so therefore what I wanted to talk about is how some of the issues about federalism in Iraq look to Iraq’s neighbors and look to the United States, and why there is strong support for federalism but lack of clarity about what that concept means.

Let me begin with the pervasive fear throughout the Middle East that we are approaching another moment like that at the end of World War I, when the map of the Middle East is going to be redrawn. The phrase "Sykes-Picot" keeps popping up in writings about this moment. In other words, there is the fear the outside powers are engaging in some secret agreement about redrawing the map. Now this time the concern is as much about redrawing the political map as it is about redrawing the geographic boundaries of the states. But still there is a powerful sense that there are plans to completely transform the region in new and unexpected ways that it is feared, will be as unsuccessful as the Sykes-Picot agreement, which was so nicely summarized by one author as "the peace to end all peace." And in particular we see a situation in which each of the six neighbors of Iraq fear that others will gain influence in this new Iraq at their expense. So we see, for instance, the Saudis petrified that this new Iraq may in fact be a democratic Iraq in which the Shia community has such a large voice that this will allow an opportunity for Iran to have great influence inside Iraq. And for them it would be a very negative example for the Saudi Shia community, which has so few political rights. And similarly, of course, we see the Turks fearing that Iran would have an influence. We also see many of these neighbors worried that a federalism inside Iraq which challenged the authority of central states (much less the independence of the Kurdish area), could be part of a western effort to split up some of the states of the region. Here we see a real paranoia in Turkey based on a history of 300 years of whittling away of the Ottoman Empire by western powers, which sponsored autonomy movements and talked about minority rights in one part of their empire after another. I think we tend to forget that in 1683 the Turks were at the gates of Vienna, ruling much of Eastern Europe and all of the Crimea, all of the Black Sea coast, all of the Caucasus, and this war steadily whittled away by this process of championing minority rights, then autonomy, and then independence. We may regard what Lord Byron did in Greece as an example of heroism; that is not necessarily the way it seemed in Turkish history. And then added to this long history—a history which by the way culminates in a very clear plan during World War I to dismember the entire Ottoman empire and not to leave any Turkish state whatsoever—we get the Kurdish movement of the PKK, a struggle in which 30,000 people die. The Turks were very suspicious in particularly of European support for this struggle was a continuation of the plan to dismember Turkey. And there is the great fear, therefore, that a federal or an autonomous or an independent Kurdish area in Iraq could be yet another part of that process. Iran is not much happier about the idea of strong autonomy for a Kurdish region. After all, Iran as a country is 40% non-Persian. Iranians are quite concerned about what may happen in the future as Azerbaijan becomes a richer country with its oil exports getting going. If the republic of Azerbaijan becomes a more successful and prosperous state, it could be a serious challenge to a country like Iran, 20 to 25% of whose people are Azeri, many of whom do not speak Persian. And, after all, Azerbaijan’s major opposition political parties have longed campaigned primarily upon a platform of the reuniting of what they call Northern and Southern Azerbaijan. Indeed, the reunification of Azerbaijan was the core principle of the constitution of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan.

And if we look at Iraq’s Arab neighbors, most of them frankly are pretty artificial countries. Saudi Arabia is a very artificial country; it is a union of three regions, which historically had little to do with each other. The eastern province, the oil rich region, had little to do with the Najd, which had little to do with the Hijaz. And the melting together of these three regions is highly imperfect. The Hashemite rulers, for instance, continue to rule in Jordan. It is their family which has ruled in Mecca for 900 of the last 1000 years, and there are many people in Mecca who still think of them as the natural rulers in the region, not those interlopers coming from the interior. Syria is not much more of a natural country. Anyone who knows about the history of the region knows that the residents of Damascus and Aleppo long hated each other intensely. And then there is of course, the Alawhite minority, about an eighth of the country, which actually runs the place now. Not to speak of the Druze minority. None of these have gotten along well together and there was a certain reality, although exaggerated by the French division of the country into four parts. And the French, after all, governed Syria as four separate states, which later united into one Syria. Well, if the neighbors are concerned about the idea of an autonomous region, let me assure them that there are a lot of problems with a federal Iraq as well, in particular if that federal Iraq takes the character of a large autonomous Kurdish region, because a Kurdish autonomous region worries the neighbors as a first step towards independence. Or in the case of Turkey, a successfully functioning autonomous Kurdish region in a federal, prosperous and democratic Iraq would be a horrible example because then there would be pressure to have the same thing inside Turkey and they don’t want to see that. So the only thing which worries the Turks more than a failed autonomous region for the Kurds in Turkey is a successful autonomous region for the Kurds in Iraq.

But there are still powerful reasons why we should all be interested in seeing a federal state, and why that has become a mantra adopted by the United States. But that federalism about which we talk, I would hope, is not a federalism of one Kurdish region but instead a federalism based upon several different regions. Ideally, to my mind, the provinces of Iraq—of which there are 18—should each have the same degree of autonomy, and there should not be some special status for the Kurdish region. That would help address a variety of issues. For one thing it would help address the problem we would have had historically in dealing with oil rich countries like Iraq where the resources come like manna from heaven before the central government, which essentially has no constraints upon how to use this money, because the citizens themselves do not have to pay taxes in order to produce it. "That’s up to those folks in the capital to decide what to do with it." And of course all too often they decide to spend it upon military weapons, which they can use to destabilize their region. And if instead we could distribute those resources to the provinces, it is much more likely that those resources are going to be used for education and health and economic development. Each of the provinces is not likely to pursue nuclear weapons on its own.

Therefore, a provincial-level federalism would be useful to combat the natural trend in a country like Iraq, which is towards an overly central state run by a powerful autocrat, and to reduce this dynamic as seen in the OPEC countries of everybody wanting to control the central government in order to have the oil resources, thus stifling civil society as a result. So a provincial-level federalism makes excellent sense.

Furthermore a provincial-level federalism makes sense for reducing the problems of the minorities in the Kurdish region—a problem, which frankly the United States has found itself already dragged into considering repeatedly. We just emphasized that this Kurdish region is not simply Kurdish. The last reliable consensus that we have in Iraq, which asks questions about ethnicity, was the 1958 census. And in that census, more than a third of the inhabitants of the Kurdish reported themselves as being non-Kurd. There is a significant minority of Assyrians, Chaldians, and other Christian groups, but in particular we’ve got a very large issue here, which is the Turkmen population. In that 1958 census, the Turkmen were 9% of the population of Iraq. Since the Turkmen are for all intents and purposes the leftovers from the Ottoman days and basically are ethnically and linguistically Turkish, the Turkish government feels very closely attached toward those Turkmen, and finds it politically convenient to exaggerate the attachment even if they weren’t finding themselves so attached. This is going to be an issue. After years of suppression of Turkish identity, even more than suppression of Kurdish identity, undoubtedly the percentage of people in Iraq who regard themselves as Turkmen has decreased. And I tend to doubt that the Turkish government is correct in its insistence that the city of Kirkuk remains a majority Turkmen city. Yet the issue of the Turkmen minority, the issue of the non-Kurdish minorities in the Kurdish areas, is going to be a real problem that we will have to deal with. Furthermore, there is a real problem that is already given us quite a few headaches and I can assure you for the people in the non-governmental organizations who are thinking about the post-conflict environment, it is driving them nuts. And it is the problem of the internally displaced people. Iraq has probably 3 million internally displaced people out of a population of 22 million resident Iraqis and 3 million outside the country. And many of those internally displaced people are in fact Kurds who had to flee from areas controlled by Baghdad or face forced Arabization. And they are going to want to return home—to homes which are now inhabited by other people who bought these places. There are going to be some problems here, folks. We are going to have a lot of difficulties about this. Even assuming that the IDP, the internally displaced people, do not return to the other parts of Iraq, we are still going to end up with a situation in which there are going to be significant Kurdish minorities outside of the Kurdish region. There are probably going to be at least a million Kurds who remain outside of any Kurdish provinces or Kurdistan that could be created. And we have to find some kind of minority rights solutions dealing with this. If we have one Kurdish autonomous region we are asking for trouble. Because that region, no matter what we say about it being defined geographically, is going to think of itself as the voice of the Kurds. And we are going to have great difficulty in keeping that region on the straight and narrow when it comes to minority rights regarding the large minorities inside Kurdistan. And we are going to have real problems from keeping them from asserting themselves, as the voice for the Kurds who live outside of Kurdistan. So if we create one Kurdish autonomous region, we have a lot of problems. If on the other hand, we give power to the provinces, we do much better.

And by the way, the Kurds themselves are divided! We are talking about a people who fought a civil war among themselves in the mid-1990s. The reality is that we don’t have a Kurdish autonomous region in Northern Iraq. We have two. We have the PUK-istan and KDP-istan, that is, areas controlled respectively by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party. We don’t have a Kurdistan. And for all the fine talk that we hear about a Kurdish autonomous region, that is just not the case. And it just makes much more sense, therefore, for us to do some minor adjustments in provincial boundaries to recognize this reality. There should be a province which is a PUK-istan and an enlarged province, which used to be two, that is a KDP-istan. And then we have a fourth province where there is going to be a great mélange of different people, including almost all of the Turkmen, a fair chunk of the Assyrians, Chaldians and a significant Kurdish minority and a bunch of Arabs as well, the Kirkuk province. It is much easier to deal with the problem of Kirkuk if we have four different ethnic groups, each of which is roughly the same size. Because then there is some interesting inter-ethnic politics and it may be that ethnicity does not become the basis of politics in that province. So a provincial level approach makes much more sense for dealing with all of these problems in the Kurdish region.

By the way – and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this—if we were to create some kind of a Kurdish autonomous region, that would create a mess in the rest of Iraq because in the rest of Iraq, we would then have a particularly difficult balance between the Sunni and Shia communities. The biggest minority problem in Iraq, I would argue, over the next period of time is not going to be the Kurdish problem, for which the solution is relatively envisionable, but instead it’s going to be the Sunni problem. The Sunni Arab minority, which is no more than 20 or 25% of the population, has historically dominated Iraqi politics and Iraqi business and the trade, the army, the media and the universities. It is going to be very difficult to adjust from that situation, where they have a disproportionate rule, and assume that it’s natural that they have disproportionate rule. Not just Edward Said, but every Arab intellectual and every Arab government is going to be extraordinarily suspicious about anything that is done which reduces the role of the Sunnis.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t know of any Arab government that wants to see democracy in Iraq, and the reason is because they don’t want to see the Shias have a role proportionate to their share in the population. We’ve got a real problem here. And if the issue becomes an issue of Sunni versus Shia, the Shia community will have real internal problems. Because the Shia community is overwhelmingly a community that is somewhat secular and certainly not well represented by the religious leaders, especially not by the rather pathetic religious leaders that are left after 20 years of Saddam’s aggression. If we have to turn to the Shia religious leaders to represent the community, that is going to be a disaster.

In short, having a Kurdish region is an invitation to exacerbating the problems in the rest of the country. And I haven’t begun to talk about the enormous intermixing of Sunni and Shia populations that is going to make it extremely difficult to draw dividing lines.

Let me turn from the broad questions of Iraq to the immediate questions of the aftermath of a conflict—assuming that there is going to be a conflict—and point out how these problems come to play for the United States and for the international community in the event of a conflict. Suppose for a moment that it becomes necessary for there to be a US-led coalition which invades Iraq for the purpose of disarming the country and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. What is the role that the Kurds are going to play? They are going to want to play some kind of a role. They are not just going to want to stay put, and the natural thing for them to do is to advance into the contested areas. So we hear the Kurdish leaders talking about taking back 300 Arabized villages—300 villages that are now inhabited by other people. And we hear talk about Kirkuk. Kurdish leaders warning us, "Look, I did not order the Peshmerugas to move forward, but don’t exaggerate the degree of control that I have over those Peshmermurga. They are going to move anyway." You can imagine what the reaction of the Turks would be.

Not to put apocalyptic terms on this, or conspiratorial terms on this, but there are certainly some who think that the reason that the Turkish general staff is quite happy to see Turkey’s Islamist government agonizing over whether to let in large numbers of US ground forces is because the Turkish general staff would like to have a situation in which the only large numbers of ground forces nearby in the event of this kind of problem are theirs. Then in the event of a problem, they would have a reason to come to the United States and say, "You have a problem here, we are the only ones that can solve it, so we will go in to the Kurdish areas." In fact, for a year now, our problem with the Turkish general staff has been that their idea of their participation in a coalition has been to send in tens of thousands of men. Our problem is not how we get the Turks involved; the problem is how we stop them from getting too involved. Therefore, intercession by US forces or international forces is likely to become a necessity to stop two groups—the Turks and the Kurds who are friendly to us—from fighting each other, which would widely be portrayed as an example of chaos and failure of a US government coalition.

Let me just close with two quick comments about an international civil administration. I think all of us assume is what is going to end up running Iraq for at least a while after Saddam is overthrown. Then there is going to have to be some kind international civil administration until we can put together an Iraqi transition government. First, from what I have described, you can imagine that involving Iraq’s neighbors—the Arab League for instance—in running Iraq afterwards is a great way to inflame communal tension inside Iraq. In other words, this is a situation in which it makes much more sense to bring in people from far away than it does rely upon neighbors for that civil administration. And then my second comment would be how far should that international civil administration go in promoting minority rights provisions in this new Iraqi government. They are going to have to decide early on who is running things. So the question is how forceful should they be in the minority rights area. I would argue that if there is any one area in which I think the international civil administration should be interventionists, it should be prepared to take a strong stance, a declaratory stance, rather than letting Iraqis decide, it would be minority rights. But the question will be how far should they go and in what way should they go.

Tim Shah: Well there is obviously a great deal to discuss. Again we will follow our usual modus operandi and if any of you have any comments or points just raise their hand, I will try and make a note of you on a piece of paper and then turn to you in due course. Yes please.

Tama Brazia: My name is Tama Brazia. I am an Arab journalist. Mr. Clawson, I’m at a loss here. I have written two books in Arabic about Iraq, but when you say the Sunni are 20 to 25 percent. Since ’83, since I came to this town to be a correspondent in the State Department, they always mention that they support the minority Shia, the right of the minority Shia in Iraq. All the 80s we heard this, written about this and saw it. Suddenly Iraq invaded Kuwait, and we are told that half of the Iraqi population are Shia; the State Department changed their documents. And after that, in ’92 or ’93, we were told that 60% of Iraqis were Shia. Also I wonder, you just give me some guidance, since I’m from Syria, that you didn’t mention that also there in Syria 1 million Kurd and also 200,000 [stateless] Bedoo according to the State Department, meaning Bedoo like the Kuwaiti Bedoo. So what about this minority of 1,200,000? Thank you.

Patrick Clawson: We don’t have a very good idea about what is the ethnic and sectarian composition of Iraq. I don’t think that any of the censuses since 1958 has been very helpful on this regard and the 1958 census, since then populations have changed in rather dramatic ways. But there certainly are lots of indicators that would suggest that if you take a look at the different provinces and even more desegregated level than that, it would certainly appear that the Shia majority areas have had a more rapid population growth than other parts of Iraq. And there certainly is every reason to believe that the previous governments understated the proportion of people who are of Shia origin.
Now I would be the first to tell you that a great many of the people who are of Shia origin, do not own that as their principal identity. If you think of any number of Shia origin people in Iraq, the idea of thinking of them in Shi’ite religious terms is quite ridiculous. They are extraordinarily secular people. But here we are talking about an ethnic—cum—religious identification, like calling somebody Protestant or Catholic in Northern Ireland; you call them that even though they may have never seen the inside of a church.

On that basis, I would certainly argue that the Shia population of Iraq is almost certainly the majority. Then we have a large Kurdish minority. It is very hard to come up with numbers that would suggest the Kurds have anything below 15%, and I would say 20% is a much more credible number for the Kurdish minority. And then if you take Turkmen and the various Christian groups, it’s very hard to see them having anything below 5% of the population. So any way you look at it, the Sunnis are definitely the minority in the country, which has a much more complex ethnic mosaic than is often recognized.

Chaim Kauffman: Chaim Kauffman, Lehigh University. My question is for Dr. Clawson. I wonder whether the fears all over the Persian Gulf region that you were talking about—that what’s coming at them is as bad as Sykes-Picot or worse—might not in fact be perfectly justified. Whether, as you say, it’s in terms of explicit line drawing on maps or other interference, we have administration officials saying that after we execute regime change in Iraq that is going to give us tremendous new leverage on the internal politics of Iran, Saudi Arabia, even Syria. And we have the administration’s favorite right-wing friends outside saying exactly the same thing, only in more florid terms. Why are they wrong to be afraid, if this is what’s coming?

Patrick Clawson: Overwhelmingly, what those "right-wing" people are saying is that after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, they are optimistic that there is going to be a wave of democracy in the region. Now I think it is a fascinating situation in which we find ourselves: it is the voices of the rabid Republican conservative movement who are talking about how good it is to see democracy and to see people empowered and to see the minorities being able to express themselves and to see civil society freed and to have more respect for a free press. And we see many people in the left-wing saying, "Come on, it is both unrealistic to expect that people want that, and it would be inappropriate if it came, because it would mean instability in the region." I participated in a vigorous debate at the Carneige Endowment for International Peace, which I thought, was truly bizarre. They invited two people they saw as being on the right of the political spectrum, including myself, who were there to defend the crazy idea that democracy is good for the Middle East and that people in the Middle East want it. As the good thinking liberal democrats wanted to defend the proposition that democracy was a dubious advantage to people in the Middle East and was unlikely to come. I really don’t understand how the political lines got drawn in that direction.

But my comment about the arguments that you and a good number of my friends make about the change that’s coming to Iraq is that the people of Iraq themselves are interested in democracy and are going to be able to do better. Just today I was chairing a talk at our Institute by a prominent Kuwaiti from Kuwait University running a think tank there, Shafeeq Ghabra, who was giving an eloquent speech about how the forces of democracy and liberalization will be unleashed in the Persian Gulf in particular but throughout the Arab world once Saddam is gone and Iraq becomes a force for good rather than a negative force in the region. I don’t quite understand how that has come to be seen as a right-wing Republican idea. And if I were somebody and active in the Democratic Party—I’m not, I’m a card carrying and proud Republican—I would be worried about that way in which the political lines seem to be drawn. I go on radio talk shows repeatedly defending the idea that democracy is good for the people in the Middle East and get all these callers into NPR shows like Talk of the Nation or whatever who regard me as some rabid conservative ideologue for my views.

Chaim Kauffman: I think a lot of the answer has to do with people’s expectations about how much additional direct American intervention in other countries’ domestic politics there is going to be.

Patrick Clawson: This administration has made it extremely clear that the kind of direct intervention politics it is thinking of is along the lines of what we did in the 1980s in Eastern Europe. And that, if I may say so, is great for Voice of America’s budget or for RFE/RL’s budget, but that is what we are talking about. It is the "City on the Hill:" it’s the holding up of the example. It’s the encouragement of liberal and democratic ideals and values. It is going to be great for the National Endowment for Democracy and all those other kinds of things which we don’t usually think the Republican Party being that involved in. But yet we find that here is a wing of the Republican Party, which is enthusiastic about spreading the message of the glories of democracy to the rest of world. If I were a liberal Democrat, I would certainly be expressing outrage about how they have taken away my agenda.

Kanan Makiya: My own experience confirms this very same phenomenon (over and over again). People who are supporting Iraqi democrats today, who are pushing the boundaries on this question, are always coming from the new conservative right in this country. In Arab politics, you get lambasted for that, but I welcome it. And liberals from the very sort of elements that I came from, and my former colleagues, are in an utter state of loss, and most of them do in fact talk about democracy in the Middle East or talk about structural change in Iraq—let’s put it that way—as something they are afraid of. I’ve even found liberals of leftist backgrounds starting to worry about destabilizing Saudi Arabia! To me, this is welcome. This is a good development in the Arab world. Why anybody would think that the current order in the Arab world is something to be preserved is just an utterly amazing thing for me. But that’s in fact what is going on.

Ashutosh Varshney: Since we discussed federalism so much, this is a comment on your comment about your Lebanese critic. About your idea of federalism, Columbia Professor Alfred Stepan wrote an article on the subject about three years ago or four years ago in the Journal of Democracy, and the profession is increasingly accepting the idea he advances there. There is clearly a distinction to be drawn between a "coming together" federalism and a "holding together" federalism. And coming together federalism is the American federalism. It actually turns out to be an exception in the larger world of federations. Most federations in the world are holding together federations. And the key defense is that existing units constitute a center in the coming together federalism. In the holding together federalism, a center or constitution exists which creates the units that are there. So I don’t know which particular model Iraq would head towards. But the logic of each is quite different. In any case, federalism is not simply an American idea. There is the holding together idea. It’s in Brazil, in South Africa, so there are a lot of places where this particular distinction may be of some relevance in discussing the federal ideas for them.

Kanan Makiya: Thank you very much. I was not aware of that particular article but I will look it up. I would have thought Iraq is very much a "holding together" federalism if it is going to happen and if it is going to work.

Patrick Clawson: However, it’s a very peculiar "holding together" federalism in that we’ve had de facto Kurdish independence the last 12 years. It is a bizarre situation you have at the moment: the critics of Kurdish autonomy are saying, "Oh my goodness, don’t go to war because who knows what that could do for the Kurds," but what you have now is de facto Kurdish independence. It is extremely difficult for the existing Kurdish authorities to keep student radicals from trying to assert a Kurdish independence. Michael Rubin, who taught for a year at the Kurdish universities, can give you wonderful examples of this—for example, the students going on strike at the university when the university authorities insisted on raising the Iraqi flag above the Kurdish flag, which appalled the students. Or the regular fights that go on when the Kurdish authorities insist that everybody get Iraqi drivers’ licenses. So it is the Kurdish authority that is insisting on holding together the state against these radicals. The Kurds don’t have to use Iraqi textbooks, but they do. So it is really quite an intriguing mixed case of "holding together" and "coming together" federalism.

Kanan Makiya: The Kurdish idea of federalism, at least as developed in a draft constitution that the KDP put forward, is very much one of accepting the de facto situation and simply calling it federalism. It’s actually not really thinking through the problem of federalism. It’s consecrating the existing lines on the ground and granting all kinds of powers. The constitution in fact is confederalized, I suppose is the proper word: it’s virtually a separate state within some larger framework of the state. So this is the idea that we are trying to challenge, to bring them or pull them into another idea of federalism, because their idea of it, partly for the reasons Patrick went into concerning the regional situation and the Iraqi situation, is not going to work and it’s going to be destructive of the Iraqi entity of the future. I don’t see us able to construct a workable Iraq on that basis. That’s why it is a much happier solution, from an Iraqi point of view, if they truly want to leave, to be able to leave. But also, not to add to the oddity of the problem, they are not being allowed to leave. And it’s not even because they’ve been held back by the Arabs. An overwhelming sentiment amongst Arab-Iraqis realization of what has been done to the Kurds is if they want to leave, they should go. In other words, the usual forces of the center dragging are trying to force somebody in there are no longer going to be operative in post-Saddam Iraq. So you have, it adds to the complexity and novelty of this situation. There is almost got to be on the part of the Kurdish leadership a recognition that they probably have more to gain as Kurds via power through Baghdad than they do through some little land-locked enclave which has got hostile neighbors all the way around even under the best of circumstances. And that idea is actually the root, the little example. The patriotic community of Kurdistan, which was a more Kurdish nationalist party historically than the KDP, has recently orientated towards Baghdad. It’s even thinking of spawning a party that can be an all-Iraqi party and it’s orientating towards fighting elections in Baghdad in the future. Thus far, they are not equipped to do that. They are an old Kurdish party. Their orientation has been entirely different. So it is a new state of mind, that’s some eight months, or a year or so in the making.

Claudia Winkler: Dr. Makiya, could you comment on the idea of using the provinces as the boundaries for federalist units or, if not, what other boundaries would you use?

Kanan Makiya: Like Patrick, I would very much like to start with the existing 18 provinces and not mess around with the existing boundaries, certainly during the transitional period and then conduct detailed discussions with the various parties to see if minor adjustments could be made. However, amongst Iraqis there is a sudden tendency as would happen with the coining of any such new word, or new idea, there is a sudden rush to draw maps, 3 part Iraq, a 5 part Iraq, a 7 part Iraq, a 9 part Iraq. I have actually about 8 or 9 such divisions of Iraq that were developed by individuals who were a part of this project who worked on this document. But we decided in the end to put all such map drawing projects or all such divisions aside and concentrate on the idea that at least during the transitional period, let’s work with the existing provinces and then let’s talk this thing through carefully over time. I am inclined to keep as much as possible of those boundaries and for much the reasons Patrick alluded to. One Kurdish region would be a big mistake because that inevitably leads towards a notion that Iraq is a tripartite state. And that’s going to be a disaster. But many Kurdish regions, many Sunni regions, and many Shia regions could have a whole complex interplay. Local and national politics would be very, very interesting.

Patrick Clawson: I’d like to make one comment about the province issue. Sometimes provinces, states, are used to provide a balance among ethnic groups so you can have for instance a bi-cameral legislature, which in fact Iraq had during the monarchy, with representatives of the provinces directly elected. Now it is very hard to see how you can use that to solve the question of the pre-eminent role of Shiites in the country. That is, it is very hard to come up with a set of provincial boundaries which don’t leave a majority of the provinces being Shia majority. And certainly since the Sunnis are also worried about some sort of a Shia-Kurdish combination, I don’t how far that would get you anyway.
My point is that it doesn’t look like you can solve the Sunni concerns by creating a bi-cameral legislature with representation of the provinces in one place. Personally, I think that you would get a lot farther by learning a lesson from the Nigerian election rules, which require that in order to be represented in Parliament, a party has to pass a certain threshold of votes in each province. So you cannot be represented in the federal legislature, unless you get let’s say 3% of the votes in each province, no matter how many votes you get in certain provinces.

Radwan Masmoudi (Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy): I have a comment and then two questions. The comment begins with the fact that both of you were perplexed that neo-conservatives and right-wing conservatives, are pushing an agenda of promoting democracy in Iraq and in the Arab world. The majority of Arabs and Muslims are even more perplexed by that and that America as country is all of a sudden interested in promoting democracy in an Arab country. And therefore they don’t believe it. Not only are they perplexed but they say the real reason is oil and supporting Israel and that we are never going to see democracy. In the end we will end up with another dictator in Iraq. So that’s the real concern or the real fear that people in the Arab world and the Muslim world have about this invasion. My two questions: First, how real is the concern that Israel will get involved in this war, either militarily against Iraq or will use the war to displace large numbers of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza? Second, Saddam is obviously a dictator and not very popular in Iraq, but I think he is trying to rally support against a foreign invasion. Arabs and Muslims tend to unite when there is a fear of foreign invasion. How real is the risk that he would succeed in rallying support among Iraqis and other Arabs in fighting the invaders?

Kanan Makiya: I don’t think he has any prospect of making any real dent in that regard. We just have to remember the precedent here, 1991, when a much larger force gathered and everybody talked of the Arab states rising from one end of the Arab world to the next. It didn’t happen with the Afghan War also, everyone was going on about the terrible consequences, but again it didn’t happen. Especially now, Saddam has been discredited in the Arab world far more than he was back then, 10 years ago. His army is a fraction of the size. He is recognized to be a brutal ruler and so on. And add to that the fact that I think the American army will be welcomed—as I told the President—with sweets and flowers when they first go in there. The likelihood, then, with things like that, of the Arab world rallying around Saddam is very, very remote. And there is simply no military need for Israel to get involved in the war in Iraq at all, that I can see. On the contrary, the United States does not want it involved.
I agree with you about the perception of the Arab view on all of this, and there is a sense in which they are right because that has been the history. Perhaps what we are looking at here is sea change American foreign policy towards the Middle East. Naturally, seeing is believing in these situations. But you know, people like myself think its real. We remember how people talked in 1991 and we know how they talk now. And we are very close to how decision-makers are thinking. There is something new. It could very well be that the pro-democracy forces in the US administration still do not win over the critics who are very wary of it. Largely coming from some quarters, there is a division inside the United States government—still at this very moment, a live division over this whole issue of how far you go in democratizing Iraq. Anything could happen. An 11th hour coup could happen, which creates a great temptation. There are many temptations in these few weeks—however long it is going to be—that could yet occur, and how it’s done is going to be crucial to its success.

For instance, there is no Iraqi partner yet. There is something in me that would rather see an American invasion take place with an Iraqi partner, just so that the story of democracy in Iraq—if that is indeed what we are talking about—does not begin with an American military occupation. This is the Middle East, after all, not quite Germany and Japan and so on. So, from my point of view, there is not enough emphasis being given in the Bush administration at the moment on the importance of working with and cultivating an Iraqi partner. That means there isn’t going to be a pole for the disaffected troops to rally around. Work could be done by such an Iraqi partner in terms of undermining whatever fighting spirit may exist inside Iraq, which I think will be very low. There are all sorts of things that could be done there, were there greater attention paid to cultivating an Iraqi partner, especially if the idea is democracy and not something else. So we are still a long way from seeing democracy actually happening. I think it is important to say that. Nonetheless, it’s a real change in American foreign policy. I don’t know if Patrick agrees with me or not.

Patrick Clawson: On your first question, paranoia among Israelis and Arabs about the intentions of the other has a long history, and with good reason, since the two sides do remarkably stupid things to the other. The dynamic of Israeli politics at the moment is who can most quickly build a security fence which divides off most of Israel from the Palestinians. And the irony, of course, is that fence is putting some 90% of the settlements on the Palestinian side of the fence. So precisely the moment when Israeli politics is abandoning the settlers in large numbers and constructing this fence, which is going to put 90% of the West Bank on the Palestinian side, the Palestinians are worried the map is going to be redrawn in a way that disadvantages them.

On your point about people in the Middle East being suspicious of US intentions, they have every reason to be suspicious of US intentions, because for a long time we have worked with friendly tyrants in the Middle East. This is the part of the world where we are most likely to work with friendly tyrants. And there are many tyrants in the Middle East who are very good at being our friends and are very good at portraying democratic forces as being hostile to us. And I wish I were as optimistic as Kanan about how this debate is going to come out. I think it’s raging within the American body politic. And that’s why I think it is particularly unfortunate that people who I would have hoped would be allies in the cause of promoting democracy and seeing democracy take the same importance in the Middle East it has taken in places like Latin America are abandoning it. I am very disappointed when I go on the websites of the people who are bringing all those anti-war protestors to this town this weekend. I challenge you to find any discussion there about democracy in Iraq, much less in the rest of the Middle East. And I think it would be wonderful if people who thought the Bush administration was being hypocritical in all this talk and cynically using the neo-conservatives were to castigate the administration for doing that. Instead of talking about how this is going to undermine the stability of the Saudis, it would be better if they were attacking the administration for its cynical manipulation and insisted that we have to judge the administration on what it does to back up these fine words with actions afterwards. That would seem to be much better for the people of the Middle East, if we could do it, and I frankly think it would be much better in American political terms as well.

David Fabrycky (Defense Intelligence Agency): I have two questions for our panelists. First, I know that former Jordanian Crown Prince Hassan caused quite a stir by participating in the July conference in London and I’m wondering if either of you, following the Afghan model, see any usefulness for symbols such as the Hashemite monarchy in post-Saddam Iraq. Second, considering that a lot of regional analysts will say that the Iraqi opposition really doesn’t have a lot of internal legitimacy in Iraq, who do you see as the forces or the voices in Iraq today that could provide the political will and the context for a unified Iraq after Saddam?

Kanan Makiya: I don’t think there will be much support for a return to the monarch in Iraq. And I’m not sure whether the Crown Prince was feeling out the waters in that conference or not. But I know the idea is out there and there are some people who argue for it. There is a monarchist movement in the opposition, which is one of the six parties. But my instincts say it’s not got much popular support. But I will leave it there; we will find out. Certainly, those of us who are involved in this document are taking the position that we ought to leave these questions open even during the constitutional period itself so the monarchists have a chance to fight it out electorally and see if they can win support for their positions. If it does turn out that I am wrong, and there is strong sentiment towards it, then maybe the Crown Prince would be a very serious contender.

Your other question was about the Iraqi opposition abroad, whether, in terms of the country, it enjoys legitimacy. I think there is a serious myth out there in parts of the Bush administration that there is something called the authentic opposition which is inside the country and something inauthentic that is supposedly outside. That myth resulted in a number of steps being taken which have been very unfortunate in the development of Iraqi opposition politics—the assumption, for instance, that ex-Ba’athist Islamists and the two Kurdish parties are "authentic" and the Iraqi National Congress and the monarchists, to take another example, are not. This is how the conference that we’ve just come from in December in London was set up. It started with a State Department idea that these 4 parties should work outside the umbrella framework of the Iraqi National Congress to initiate this conference. Pressure from those other 2 parties, it is what changed this whole equation. So that by the end of the conference, a conference which was supposed to be restricted to 50 people by these 4 parties. The conference—basically a closed-door type of affair in which decisions were made in secret, which someone blasted wide open and 350 to 400 people attended. And the dominant forces played a major role in the conference although they didn’t do so well in the leadership committee that emerged out of it were the independents and democrats. That was a fight that was waged with the Bush administration. Now talking about politics inside Iraq. One of the reasons that not enough work has been done and not enough attention has been paid to the Iraqi opposition that already exists is the belief that inside Iraq are all these forces that we are going to be able to work with tomorrow. But if you consider that the only kind of politics that is possible to have inside Iraq or the better part of 20 years is either Ba’athist politics or conspiracy politics, conspiracy against the Ba’ath. It is not an awful lot there to work with the day after—that is, if you are interested in democracy. If you’re interested in a military dictatorship, maybe yes. But if you are interested in something far more structural, you really have to work with the opposition groups that do have deep networks and connections inside Iraq.

Just a final comment. There are in a country of 22 million or so people, something like 7 million people who have been outside the control of this regime for at least 10 years. You have the Kurds on the one hand, there’s 4 million. And another 3 to 4 million Iraqis scattered around the world in different places who have entered into these various opposition organizations. That is 7 out of 22. That’s almost a third of the population. This is a very important, and not some small community that is tied off from a big country that is not going to play a role. Using it and enticing back in is a central part of the issue of democratizing Iraq, if that is going to happen. Building that in politically, giving them a role politically in the early years, that is for sure going to be a declining one over time as it seems to me very important. And that is an argument that is going on between people like myself and the Bush administration at this very moment.

Jay Tolson (US News and World Report): Professor Makiya, what are the odds of some kind of consensus developing among the opposition elements on this issue of a non-ethnic federalism, being the road map for Iraq’s future? How important is it that there be some kind of consensus before the possible coming conflict occurs—precisely because the prospect of the Peshmurga moving into the 400 Arabized villages or Kirkuk, and establishing on the ground a reality that perhaps then the US and others would have to alter, would be pretty grim? You’ve gone some distance toward answering that question by saying that the opposition has not been consulted enough yet. This is a more specific question.

Kanan Makiya: I think it’s a very important question which you just brought up, and actually I would urge the Bush administration to help sponsor discussions around this very question. Very wisely the Kurdish Peshmurga were not invited to be trained by the Department of Defense, as some 4,000-5,000 other Iraqis have been, and also incidentally, of course, Syria’s militia forces haven’t. In other words, there hasn’t been a consecration of them. I think that was deliberate and perhaps has something to do with the way they are thinking about what will happen with the Arabized villages that you mentioned.

Although there are no signs of it yet, I am hoping that the United States has thought through these questions before it enters Iraq. What we don’t want is a situation where they enter only part of Iraq and leave Northern Iraq, and then we actually further consecrate that division. So this is a problem that needs to be thought about now. Our document, "Transition to Democracy in Iraq," started the process; nobody had really done so beforehand. And now, I am starting to be considered a great friend of the Kurds; I did a lot of work on the genocide. But now I am taking them to task over some of these questions, and they are kind of upset at the moment. So, I spoke personally to Masmoud, I had the support of various other leaders, and the opposition do want to see this come through. The ideas I expressed today are supported by at least two of the main parties: The Iraqi National Congress, which does not want to see an ethnic federalism in Iraq, and certainly the monarchists. I suspect others, but they are not saying so.

The recomposition of the opposition that took place in the December conference actually has created a climate that is more conducive to discussing these things. There has been a rapprochement between the KDP and the Congress, which is important. And I am hoping I will be able to test this atmosphere when I go to northern Iraq for this next meeting, which is supposed to take place now in a week or so. So we will see. But I am pressing to get some serious thinking started on these issues beforehand, not afterward.

Patrick Clawson: If I can make a quick comment, let me note that the US government’s "plan A" for this is to put thousands of ground troops, both US and British ground troops, on the ground in Turkey so that we would have a large intercession force. It’s not clear that is going to work. And if it doesn’t, we need to come up with a plan B fast. And my plan B would in fact be to work closely with the Peshmurga to give them something to do. Because if you don’t give them something to do, then their impulse would be to find something to do, and what they want to do is exactly what you warned, which is to go into the Arabized villages and go into Kirkuk. Find a way to work with them so they can engage the roughly 7 Iraqi divisions facing them and support them in doing that. Furthermore, you can then tie down Iraqi forces, and they can justly feel that they are making an important contribution to the war effort.