Just Chip, Chipping Away

The process of chipping away at Iraq that will, if successful, lead to the three nations that should have emerged nearly nine decades ago from the Versailles peace process, is beginning. The fringes of Iraq will inevitably be the first to go.

Alas, so far no peacemaker has emerged like Dick Holbrooke and no process like the Dayton Accords, which he so deftly engineered. This pact effectively dismantled the system cobbled together for the Balkans in Paris in 1919. As described in detail in A Shattered Peace, the Paris Peace Conference resulted in the creation of the benighted nation of Yugoslavia that itself dissolved in bloodshed after the death of its leader, Josip Broz Tito – violence less intense, less visible than what we are experiencing in Iraq, but no less horrifying for its inhabitants.

Now, however, the first whiffs of a Dayton process may be appearing in the land known (before the Western powers got their mitts on it at the start of the last century) as Mesopotamia.

In Iraq, just as happened in Yugoslavia when the wheels began coming off the nation after the death of Tito, the wealthiest and most stable region became the first to start moving toward full independence.

In Yugoslavia, where I lived for nearly three years during Tito's reign, the prosperous state of Slovenia long considered itself closer in any every way— language (a Latin rather than Cyrillic alphabet), religion (Roman Catholicism rather than Serbian Orthodox or Moslem), and above all standard of living – to its neighbors, Austria and Italy. Slovenia's war for independence was shorter (10 days compared with a bloody four years for neighboring Croatia), and its path to full membership in both NATO and European Community shorter, than any of the other Yugoslav republics. Croatia is still waiting for the official call, which is not expected before 2009; Macedonia became an official candidate in 2005; while Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia are merely recognized as potential candidates. But Slovenia will hold the presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first six months of 2008.

In these respects, Kurdistan is the Slovenia of Iraq. Before World War I it was a province of the Ottoman Empire. Afterwards, while some negotiators in Paris in1919 thought they might create it as a separate nation, the Kurds wound up divided three ways – between the British and French mandate states of Iraq and Syria respectively, and Turkey, the stump nation that remained of the once vast Ottoman territories.

In any event, the Kurdish region of Iraq is by far the most stable and, while it does not have the vast oil resources of the southern Shiite territories along the Person Gulf oil basin, it is also a prosperous territory that could easily stand on its own. Indeed the new Iraqi constitution does grant it all but unprecedented autonomy – a reality that has not escaped neighboring Turkey. The Turkish government views with horror an independent Kurdistan, which would be a magnet for its own Kurds and, it believes, a security nightmare.

So last week, Turkey declared several areas near its border with Iraq "temporary security zones" and reportedly began massing troops there, some allegedly crossing into northern Iraq (Kurdistan) in hot pursuit of Kurdish guerrillas who, from time to time, launch raids into Turkey.

The issue is likely to become even more fraught as the time approaches for a referendum later this year over whether the city of Kirkuk – the heart of the Kurdish oil region – should be incorporated into an autonomous (or semi-autonomous) Kurdistan.

If the referendum succeeds, the first step toward a tri-partite division of Iraq, as detailed in A Shattered Peace, will become a reality. The next tentative steps toward some form of Dayton Accord are already under way. American diplomats have talked with officials of Iran and Syria both of whom (along with neighboring Sunni Saudi Arabia). Each of these neighbors of Iraq may hold the key to an end to hostilities and creation of peaceful, if not immediately stable, territories where Shiites and Sunnis can separately pursue their own way of life.