Iraq and Afghanistan

As readers of this blog know, I have often pointed to the reality and even desirability of a Kurdish state emerging from today's Iraq. There are many problems with this scenario, including the opposition of the United States, the opposition of neighboring states, and the likelihood that a Kurdish attempt to create a new state might plunge Iraq into a possibly interminable war.

Now along comes James Glanz of the New York Times with a long piece on Basra and the new south in the "News in Review" section of this Sunday's edition. One does not know whether to take Glanz seriously or not. It is worrisome that the New Yorker piece mentioned in the last posting on the situation in Basra has almost no overlap with the Glanz discussion. Let's remember this, but leave it for now.

Glanz paints a picture of a newly emerging sense of community consciousness in Basra, and beyond that of the south. Many of the people here, he writes, want to have their own place in the world and forget Baghdad. He says that the new southerners imagine three different versions of a separate south. The first, the one most appealing to the powers that be in Basra (or what he sees as the powers that be, largely rich merchants I believe), is essentially a city state based on Basra and its surroundings. Their model would be Singapore with a little bit of Las Vegas thrown in (apparently some years back Basra was the casino playground for the rich of the Gulf). The largest southern state that he maps out would include Karbala and Najaf, essentially all the overwhelmingly Shi'a parts of Iraq. Another version would be a compromise between these two.

The economic base for such a new configuration appears promising. Some of the larger international companies, such as Kellogg, Brown, and Root are moving their operations to Basra. They find the atmosphere more accommodating, and appreciate the less anti-foreign and more open attitude. Basra also sees itself as a part of the Gulf. One interesting aspect is that the head of the Shaykhi Shiites is resident in Basra, making another tie with the Gulf countries that also have many Shaykhi communities.

(It should be noted that the Shaykhis are another interesting component of the patchwork that is Iraq. Like most Iraqi and Iranian Shiites, they are ithna ashariya or twelvers, but unlike the others they believe in attaining spiritual knowledge through intuition rather than rationalization from texts. It was the Shaykhis that laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Bab in the nineteenth century, and the Bab was the forerunner of Bahaiullah, the founder of Bahaism that has its world headquarters in Israel. For most Muslims, Bahais are heretics and persecuted as such. Turning to another aspect of the patchwork, the tribes of Iraq overlap everything else. They are composed of sections with different religious allegiances, and even overlap with the Kurds. Tribal leaders are the ones who can guarantee your personal safety if you are in trouble, not the religious leaders. I have also seen little discussion of the Yezidis in the news. Their religious beliefs have Islamic, Zoroastrian, and pagan aspects. Several thousand Kurds are Yezidis. Apparently some modern secular Kurdish leaders looking for another basis for differentiation see Yezidiism as the true Kurdish religion. We could go on and on. There are many different Christian groups, an array of Sufi orders within the Muslim community etc.)

What is exciting to me about the idea of a Shiite state in the south is that this would take the pressure off the Kurds. It would mean that a peaceful reformation of the country might be possible with a Sunni-Shi'a, largely secular state centered on Baghdad, a secular Kurdish state in the north, and a Shi'a, but not necessarily theocratic, state in the South. All would get what they really want, and no major group would feel it was being unfairly dominated by another. The biggest sticking point might be the division of the oil resources, for these are not uniformly distributed. If the Kurds do get the Kirkuk area in the end, then I believe the new Iraq centered on Baghdad would be the state with the least oil.

All this offers a new vision. Whether there is any reality in it remains to be seen.