Could the fourth year of the Iraq invasion see the country divided into several entities, asks Firas Al-Atraqchi The argument to divide Iraq into three or five distinct regional and ethnic entities resurfaced with renewed poignancy in recent months. Such ideas came to head when a senior Democratic Senator offered his blueprint for resolving the Iraq debacle last week. United States Senator Joseph Biden and foreign policy expert Leslie Gelb wrote in The New York Times that dividing the country into three separate entities would be the surest way to end the violence. Modeled after the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords for the former Yugoslavia, "The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralising it, giving each ethno-religious group -- Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab -- room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests," they wrote. The timing of this declaration is not at all surprising because it follows a long list, like a recipe for civil war and decimation, which has been employed by foreign occupiers -- and covert allies -- in Iraq. The first phase was to invade Iraq. The second phase was propping up Iraqi exiles in power. The third phase is fomenting civil strife and conflict. The fourth phase is the division of the country and its oil wealth. The first phase, which lasted from 9 April until 28 June, 2004, saw the destruction of the former government's infrastructure with emphasis placed on decentralising every aspect of governance. The decentralisation was aided by the looting, pillaging and plundering of both the education and public health care system, an occurrence which US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the time chalked up as "stuff happens". The government's national archives were also burned to the ground. Civil servants, who were Baathists (or with ties to the Baathist government), were fired and replaced. Tens of thousands of teachers were also fired. Concurrently, the army was disbanded and members of the intelligence apparatus were hunted down while disparate militia serving various sects were given room to grow. At the time both the Badr and Peshmerga militia were seen as allies in the chase of fugitive Baathists. However, despite US pledges to either capture firebrand Shia leader Muqtada Al-Sadr or kill him, his Mehdi Army was allowed to prosper and grow. The second phase, which began following the so-called "handing over of sovereignty" in June 2004 and lasted till August 2005, saw the rapid emergence of foreign exiled Iraqis, divided under strict ethnic and sectarian lines, and a majority of whom had no contacts with the Iraqi people nor were known to the Iraqi people. These exiles would prove to be malleable to external forces and pressures and since alienated from the Iraqi society would act in their own best interests and the interests of the army tanks on which they rode into "liberated" Baghdad. With scant popular support, their sustenance would lie in their allegiance to Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer and the US military. In turn, the CPA would brandish the new Iraqi politicians before the Iraqi people in elections labelled as free, fair and democratic. The Iraqi people would engage in electing from a pre-selected list of candidates, who would then appear to bicker amongst each other until they agree who should run the country. Ministries and their respective posts would be divided along sectarian and ethnic lines and sectarianism, not liberalism, not nationalism, would be the new ethos of Iraq. The third phase, which began with the maddening rush to complete a new constitution in August 2005 and will likely conclude at the end of 2006 or early 2007, focuses on sectarian conflict. Here, sectarian differences -- planted by the fact that the government itself was divided along sectarian lines -- would stir civil strife forcing the creation of cantons or "safe havens" in major parts of the country. A climate of fear would arise with continuing stories and rumours of civil war in a vicious cycle, pushing Shia families to move into predominantly Shia neighbourhoods, Sunnis into Sunni cantons, and other minorities to leave the country altogether. An understanding will emerge by foreign imperialist powers -- US and UK, with Israel pulling the strings -- that it is in the best interest of the Iraqi people that the country be further decentralised. The future of Iraq, it will be stressed more and more, is federalism, a loose federalism creating semi-autonomous regions in Iraq. But the violence will not decrease. On the contrary, it will continue at elevated levels -- encouraged and funded by the US which will both condemn it and use it as a pretext to move semi-autonomous regions into fully autonomous city-states. The fourth phase will eventually focus on how to divide the country and which groups would get the lion's share of oil exploration and revenues. The idea to break up Iraq following US military invasion is not a novel approach and should not be dismissed lightly. In 1973, Mustafa Barazani -- current leader of Iraqi Kurdistan -- called on American policy makers to protect the Kurds from "the wolves" in Baghdad and in exchange offered to open up Kirkuk's oil fields to American oil companies. Today, the Kurdish areas are virtually autonomous and Kirkuk is a contentious issue for Turkmen, Arabs, Kurds and Assyrians in the north of Iraq. Foreign oil companies have already negotiated exploration and drilling rights in Iraqi Kurdistan without approval of the Baghdad government. Israeli journalist, operative and former Israeli Foreign Ministry analyst Oded Yinon has always maintained that the break-up of Iraq served long-term Israeli interests in the Middle East. In "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," which appeared in the World Zionist Organisation's periodical Kivunim in February 1982, Yinon wrote: "To dissolve Iraq is even more important for us than dissolving Syria. In the short term, it's Iraqi power that constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. The Iran-Iraq war tore Iraq apart and provoked its downfall. All manner of inter-Arab conflict help us and accelerate our goal of breaking up Iraq into small, diverse pieces." Twenty years later, Leslie Gelb, a senior member of the Council on Foreign relations and Biden's co-author, himself penned several treatise urging that Iraq be divided. In November 2003, Gelb urged the Bush administration to create three states out of Iraq allocating the north to the Kurds, the centre to the Sunnis and the south to the Shia community. Following in Gelb's footsteps is David Zohar, an Israeli Foreign Ministry Iraq analyst, who said in a Jerusalem Post article (9 April) "With patience and skill it is not too late to partition Iraq and establish a confederal state in its place. It may be the only way out of the deadlock." He believes such division would ultimately serve Israeli interests because it would ensure that Iraqi oil is flowing to world markets and that "Palestinians would finally realise that partition is the name of the game". A game (subjugation) played out with knights (US and UK forces) and pawns (Iraqi citizenry) on the grand chessboard (Middle East). Today, it is not in error to say that the Iraq war was initiated for the undeclared goal of dividing the country and forever weakening the Arab nation. Caught in the middle will be Iraqi families and tribes who already comprised a rich mixture of Shia, Sunni, Turkmen and Kurd.
