Gelb’s outrageous plan for Iraq

Les Gelb, the former President of New York’s almost terminally inbred (and very powerful) “Council on Foreign Relations”, has an op-ed piece in the NYT today arguing that the US should– unilaterally!– work toward the speedy splitting of Iraq into three separate states.
Gelb gets to publish this almost lunatic–and extremely dangerous–idea right there in the NYT because he is the former editor of its op-ed pages. He used to be quite smart and generally fairly ethical. Can’t think what’s been eating at his brain to bring him to this.
I see that Juan Cole has a good post on his blog pointing out some of the many flaws in Gelb’s argument. But actually, I think Gelb’s argument is, at several levels, far worse than Juan makes it out to be.
For several reasons.
The first and most serious one is that the US has no right simply to split up Iraq into three states or make any other such serious changes in the country’s administration. No right whatsoever.
The Geneva-based International Committee for the Red Cross is the body which, under a series of international treaties, is the international depository for the body of “laws of war” called “international humanitarian law” (IHL). Therefore, the ICRC’s commentaries on various aspects of IHL– including the Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, etc.– are considered authoritative. In a useful factsheet on the rights and duties of an occupying power, the ICRC notes:

The Occupying Power cannot change the status of the territory it occupies. Though it becomes the de facto administrator of that territory, the Occupying Power must maintain and preserve the economic and social structures and respect the customs. It can amend the laws and regulations in force in the territory only to the extent needed to enable it to meet its obligations under the Fourth Convention, and to maintain orderly government and ensure its own security.

Actually, this set of limitations applies to many of the far-reaching changes the occupying powers (that is, the US-led coalition) have tried to institute in Iraq, including the sweeping steps toward economic privatization, etc. And it would most certainly apply to any attempt by the US-dominated coalition to split the country into three states.
(There are reasons, remember, for the strict limits the Geneva Conventions place on what an occupying power may do with the territory and the people over which it runs an occupation. The conventions were codified in this form in 1949, when the recent depradations that the Nazi armies had wrought all over the lands of Europe that they had occupied were still a recent and vivid memory.)
A second deep problem with Gelb’s proposal becomes clear if you read three-fourths of the way down his text. The three separate states he proposes splitting Iraq into would be, from north to south: a Kurdish state, a Sunni Arab state, and a Shi-ite Arab state. And–

The general idea is to strengthen the Kurds and Shiites and weaken the Sunnis, then wait and see whether to stop at autonomy or encourage statehood.
The first step would be to make the north and south into self-governing regions, with boundaries drawn as closely as possible along ethnic lines. Give the Kurds and Shiites the bulk of the billions of dollars voted by Congress for reconstruction…

Of course, Gelb is so “smart” that he recognizes–to a certain extent– that Iraq does have a certain degree of inter-group mixing, especially in the central area (but also, which he pays little heed to, in the north as well). So the idea of drawing new boundaries “as closely as possible along ethnic lines” is by no means as clearcut or as easily do-able as it sounds.
And Gelb quite realistically foresees the possibility that if his chosen scenario of systematically weakening the Sunnis is enacted,

without power and money, the Sunnis may cause trouble.
For example, they might punish the substantial minorities left in the center, particularly the large Kurdish and Shiite populations in Baghdad. These minorities must have the time and the wherewithal to organize and make their deals, or go either north or south. This would be a messy and dangerous enterprise, but the United States would and should pay for the population movements and protect the process with force.

This is where his proposal gets truly sick. Having asserted that the US has some right simply to carve occupied Iraq up into three states as it pleases, he proposes that the US should then actually facilitate and pay for the massive degree of ethnic cleansing that would most likely ensue.
For example, there are around two million or more Shi-ites in Baghdad. US forces would cooperate in uprooting them from homes there that in many or most cases their families have lived in for generations?
You gotta be kidding.
Gelb bases his whole argument about carving up Iraq on a deeply flawed analogy with the events of the past 15 years in the territory now called the “former” Yugoslavia. There, for 45 years after WW2 there had been a Titoist federation of states; but from 1990 onward Yugoslavia started to fall apart. The Slovenes got their independence; then the Croatians and Bosnians wanted theirs; then the Macedonians; then even the Kosovars (though they didn’t even have a fully-fledged “state” in the Tito-ist scheme.) The west more or less went along with– or in some cases, even encouraged–that breakup.
My first reaction to Gelb’s use of this analogy: after everything else the Iraqis have gone through in the past 25 years, Les Gelb now wants to inflict on them some nightmare scenario out of the Balkan wars of ethnic cleansing?? Like, what happened in FY was such a great precedent for anyone else to follow??
My second reaction was that this is a totally crap analogy anyway because, despite eveything else that was going on in FY at the time in terms of external machinations, international arms salemen hovering around, geopolitics, etc., etc., still, the main impetus for those states to secede from the federation came from the peoples (or a noisy subset of the peoples) of those states themselves. It certainly was not imposed on them by any arrogant outside power.
And, as Juan Cole makes abundantly clear in his post, the desire for outright secession among the sub-groups of Iraqis is miniscule or nonexistent. I recall, too, that Riverbend had a good piece recently about general good relations and intermixing among the different sub-groups in Iraq…
Gelb’s proposal is worse than merely being ill-informed, illegitimate under international law, and highly unethical. It is also extremely inflammatory. Schemes by imperial powers to split up various of the Middle Eastern countries are nothing new in the history of the region, and a fear of such schemes runs deep in the psyches of many Arabs and Muslims…
So okay, Ms. Wise-ass Helena, how would I deal with the evident diversity of Iraq’s national population and try to ensure that no community’s vital needs and interests get swamped in the future?
Well, the country already has 18 governorates, a very fine number within which numerous different kinds of the country’s sub-groups can all feel adequately represented. South Africa has nine provinces; and Spain has, I think 15 or 17. Each of those democratic countries nowadays supports a very diverse population in which a range of ethnic/linguistic (in both countries) and religious (in South Africa) groupings can feel well represented.
So why should we imagine that the Iraqis would be incapable of working out some analogous arrangement that would suit them? Of course they can do it.
They can’t, however, be expected to do it so long as they’re under the heel of a foreign military occupation. (And sorry folks, that still is the technical term for what the US is running in Iraq, despite some deluded self-descriptions that it is there solely as a “liberator”. Check out some of my earlier posts about the nature of occupations.)
No, clearly what is needed in Iraq is an immediate handover to UN legitimacy and authority in Iraq, and then a speedy transition to self-rule. Self-rule, that is, for the one country of Iraq. Enough of these crass schemes to split the country up!