Partition or Federalism in Iraq

Behind a semantic disagreement between Charles Krauthammer and Max Boot lays important distinctions about the potential futures in Iraq.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Charles Krauthammer is a genius at applying logic to the unintelligible caterwauling from the Left. In his Friday Washington Post column he points out that, “Iraq is being partitioned -- and, like everything else in Iraq today, it is happening from the ground up.”

Krauthammer isn’t necessarily pessimistic about this: “The lines today are being drawn organically by self-identified communities and tribes. Which makes the new arrangement more likely to last.”

Another bright analyst and piercer of ignorance, with more personal exposure to conditions on the ground, Max Boot takes semantic issue at Commentary’s Contentions blog. Within the semantics, however, are very important distinctions, with very different portents for the future of Iraq and the region. Which, or what else, will come to pass remains to be seen. It’s my view that Boot may be closer to evolving reality.

Question: Is America “partitioned” into 50 states? By the loose definition of “soft partition” that some (like Krauthammer) use, you could say yes. After all, the federal government doesn’t provide most basic services, from welfare to policing to education; at most it supplements locally provided services (e.g., the FBI backs up or supplants local law enforcement in a few instances) and provides funding (e.g., “block grants”) to pay for locally provided services. While you could describe this arrangement as a “soft partition,” the more commonly accepted term is “federalism,” and it is a good description of what is happening in Iraq.

Pretty much everyone agrees that there should be some degree of decentralization in Iraq, with the central government in Baghdad taking care of a few responsibilities (such as the army, foreign policy, and splitting oil revenues) and the rest of the governance functions delegated to provinces and municipalities (with funding provided from Baghdad). The chief success of American troops in the past year in Anbar and other provinces has been in beefing up local law enforcement functions, within a framework of a larger Iraqi state. For instance, the Iraqi army, composed of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, is actively working with Sunni militias and local Sunni-dominated police forces to fight al Qaeda.

That hardly constitutes vindication, to my mind, of those who advocated partitioning Iraq into three new states composed exclusively of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. That is a “solution” still rejected by most Iraqis: it would be almost impossible to implement without tremendous bloodshed because most of Iraq’s eighteen provinces have mixed populations. Federalism, on the other hand, is a way that Iraq can remain a single state while still recognizing great differences between different provinces. Why this should be called “partition” is a bit of a mystery.