Why 'soft partition' of Iraq won't work

Most Iraqis wish their country to remain unified.

from the March 12, 2007 edition

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The Kurdish parties are using their relative political strength to maximize their future opportunities for secession. The Kurds' separation into an autonomous region with extensive powers should not be problematic, unless they fail to compromise on control over the historically mixed region of Kirkuk, which holds 12 percent of Iraq's proven oil reserves.

SCIRI's case is different. Despite the political power it enjoys because of its Iran-supported militia, the party lacks support among Shiites. To compensate, SCIRI began peddling a novel idea as the Constitution was being drafted: creation of a Shiite "superregion" covering Iraq's nine southern governorates, which together account for 70 to 80 percent of proven oil reserves. It is this notion, inserted into the Constitution, that helped inflame sectarian debate. It also proved divisive among Shiites. Most members of the Shiite alliance have rejected the idea, even as they support some degree of power decentralization.

Iraq's Sunni Arabs are just as divided, but they agree on one thing: They reject a federal scheme that would give them an unenforceable guarantee of oil revenues while cutting them from power. While they have no interest in a return to a strong central state (this time controlled by Shiites), they abhor SCIRI's brand of federalism.

A workable compromise might be an asymmetric federalism that accepts a Kurdish region with significant autonomous powers and that devolves a lesser degree of power from the central state to the remaining 15 governorates of "Arab" Iraq. That way, no powerful regional government would monopolize oil revenues or be able to ignore a Constitutional guarantee on oil-revenue sharing. Nor would a central state be so strong that an authoritarian leader could turn it into another tyranny.

To reach such a compromise, the Bush administration would have to do something it has long resisted: It should pursue a forceful multilateral approach to press Iraqis across the political spectrum to forge a true national compact – the kind of overall compromise that the Constitution, in its sectarianism, failed to deliver. The alternative to compromise will not be a loose federation of Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite entities, as advocates of soft partition claim; rather, it will be the chaos of a failed state that could fall prey to its more powerful neighbors.

• Joost Hiltermann is deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa program of the International Crisis Group. He is based in Amman, Jordan.

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