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REFLECTING UPON “YUGOPOTAMIA”

Juan Cole spoke out today on the downsides of the potential partitioning of Iraq:

“Iraq is not divided neatly into three ethnic enclaves. It is all mixed up. There are a million Kurds in Baghdad, a million Sunnis in the Shiite deep south, and lots of mixed provinces (Ta’mim, Ninevah, Diyalah, Babil, Baghdad, etc.). There is a lot of intermarriage among various Iraqi groups. Look at President Ghazi Yawir. He is from the Sunni Arab branch of the Shamar tribe. But some Shamar are Shiites. One of his wives is Nasrin Barwari, a Kurdish cabinet minister. What would partition do to the Yawirs?



Then, how do you split up the resources? If the Sunni Arabs don’t get Kirkuk, then they will be poorer than Jordan. Don’t you think they will fight for it? The Kurds would fight to the last man for the oil-rich city of Kirkuk if it was a matter of determining in which country it ended up.



If the Kurds got Kirkuk and the Sunni Arabs became a poor cousin to Jordan, the Sunni Arabs would almost certainly turn to al-Qaeda in large numbers. Some Iraqi guerrillas are already talking about hitting back at the US mainland. And, Fallujah is not that far from Saudi Arabia, which Bin Laden wants to hit, as well, especially at the oil. Fallujah Salafis would hook up with those in Jordan and Gaza to establish a radical Sunni arc that would destabilize the entire region



Divorced from the Sunnis, the Shiites of the south would no longer have any counterweight to religious currents like al-Dawa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Sadrists. The rump Shiite state would be rich, with the Rumayla and other fields, and might well declare a Shiite Islamic republic. It is being coupled with the Sunnis that mainly keeps them from going down that road. A Shiite South Iraq might make a claim on Shiite Eastern Arabia in Saudi Arabia, or stir up trouble there. The Eastern Province can pump as much as 11% of the world’s petroleum.”



Iraq is the bastard child of centuries of the Ottoman Empire’s communal pluralism after having been forcibly ravished by British imperialism, with Winston Churchill as the midwife. Iraq made sense as a state only as a sop to the Hashemites, the British clients rudely ejected from Mecca by Abdul Aziz. Over time, the Iraqis did acquire a sense of nationalism that, while not as rarified as the German or French varieties, has proven significantly stronger than what you find in the other artificial nation-states carved up by the colonial powers, particularly in Africa.

That being said, Iraq is held together primarily by the extrinsic pressure of Turkey that is adamantly opposed to statehood for the Kurds. If Talabani and Barzani ever manage an understanding with Ankara over the Turcomen minority, Iraq is finished, at least in it’s present form since the Kurds gain little but headaches and insecurity from their Arab co-nationalists.

Nor would I put much stock in intermarriage as social glue. Intermarriage rates were high in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and we all saw how well that worked out. For Iraq to remain as a unified state there needs to be a strong economic rationale that appeals to the self-interest of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis as well as a sense of physical security that no group will be left at the mercy of the others. That economic rationale does not exist which is why Saddam Hussein had to use terror gratuitously rather than minimally to maintain his rule and that terror has damaged any normal sense of security and trust among Iraqis required for a multiethnic civil society.

I do not think in 25 years there will be an Iraq. At best there will be an Iraq plus a Kurdistani Republic.

THE FUTURE OF ANDREW

His predictions for 2005

Andrew is a lot more optimistic on Iran. While I put my faith in the stupidity of the clerical regime hardliners ( Khameini really isn’t that bright – he’s the Konstantin Chernenko of Khomeinist Islamism – but with better health) Andrew prefers to vest his confidence in their ability to annoy the Iranian people.

“Iran- The US will buy off the Iranians, in a sense. Giving Tehran security guarantees and offering to lift sanctions, the Bush administration will convince the Iranians to accept IAEA monitoring of their nuclear program, with the understanding that the Iranians could still pursue a program for “peaceful purposes”. With the US threat diminished inside Iran, the legitimacy of the mullahs will be the primary grievance of Iranians, setting in motion events that will eventually culminate in another revolution. This will mark a shift in Us policy towards Iran, instead of isolating the US will choose to open up Iran in efforts to weaken the regime.”

ADDENDUM: JB SEES THE RITING ON THE WALL FOR ACADEMIC PROGNOSTICATIONS

A nice summative review with commentary

AN IMPORTANT POST FOR THOSE WHO SEE A NEED FOR A MORE RESPONSIBLE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

I was not intending to blog tonight being tired and out of sorts until I saw something quite important at The American Future – a frequent occurence on Marc Shulman’s blog Some very senior Democrats held what I can only describe as ” a closed door intervention” with the erstwhile UN Secretary-General Kofi ” What, me worry ? ” Annan, currently on track to tie Kurt Waldheim as the most morally disreputable SG in UN history, while matching U Thant for the most useless. Marc excerpted:

“First, they said, Mr. Annan had to repair relations with Washington, where the Bush administration and many in Congress thought he and the United Nations had worked against President Bush’s re-election. Second, he had to restore his relationship with his own bureaucracy, where many workers said privately that his office protected high-level officials accused of misconduct.”

Speaking as an incurable hawk with a penchant for big-picture analysis, I found this to be refreshing. The UN, to say nothing of the reputation of the thoroughly discredited Mr. Annan, is beyond repair at this point but the Democratic Party may still be salvageable. I’m not going to hold my breath but this burst of truth-talking realism was a healthy development. Now if only the Democrats will start saying things like that in public.

Frankly, long-term world security depends a lot more on the Democratic Party freeing itself from the grip that the Chomskyian nutjob Left has over that party’s than it ever will on the antics of the UN.

FOR THE FANS OF PNM AND THE ANALYSTS OUT THERE

Hmm..I see that TM Lutas has already broken the ice…..

I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Barnett has cordially invited me to become a Regular Contributer to The Rule-Set Reset, a limited circulation client newsletter that he will be publishing via The New Rule-Set Project, LLC. If you have enjoyed reading The Pentagon’s New Map or my posts on PNM theory here at Zenpundit or at HNN then you will also have a great deal of interest in RSR. The managing editor, Silicon Valley uber-consultant Bob Jacobson, PhD has put together a dynamic stable of writers, mostly field experts, who will be offering strategic insights in a global context. Including, of course, an exclusive monthly article by Dr. Barnett.

The Rule-Set Reset will offer its readers a high degree of interactivity with the authors something that you cannot get with the mass-circulation elite publications like The Economist or Foreign Affairs. The client letter is aimed primarily at corporations, institutional investors, academia, government agencies and professional analysts so while the subscription price isn’t exactly cheap it compares very favorably with the other analytical publications of this type.

Hope to see your letters on the pages of RSR in 2005 !

SPOTLIGHT ON STUART

Stuart Berman, a fairly new addition to the blogroll had an interesting post where he managed to work in creativity theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Lord of the Rings, The Pentagon’s New Map and economic theory. Not a bad combination I’d say. In this excerpt, Berman asked:

“2) If free and democratic governments are more viable than socialist (or other top down authoritarian regimes) does it also make sense that corporations should also become ‘free and democratic’?



My impression of many large corporations today is that they are run like benevolent dictatorships or other centralized planning regimes. If a corporation can be structured like a democracy where there is limited government (management which has a core function, specific responsibilities, term limits, transparency) we might see the corporation of the future. I believe this may be viable for the same reason that socialist societies are far less effective and enjoyable than free market societies – our society functions remarkably well despite it complexity and lack of centralized planning, the market knows better than any individual or committee. Mihaly says take the hand off the worker and let them (workers as the market) decide what is best. I am not advocating anarchism or a lack of governance but rather a rebalance – management needs to be very disciplined about where it should tread and where it should not. [Barnett’s rule sets again – and as he notes that in a democracy or horizontal organization you are given free reign unless you cross certain defined lines of action – whereas in a vertical organization (autocracy) there is an attempt to constrain what you think or are exposed to. Corporations are not that extreme but somewhere in the middle – I think there is more room to move toward Mihaly’s democracy.]”



A good question. I’m of two minds in terms of the answer which could be divided into matters of principle and matters of practice.

In principle there is a fundamental difference between a corporation and its employees and a State and its citizens. Namely that while in the case of the State the citizenry forms the only interested party in the case of the corporation it exists as property held by shareholders in addition to being a legal entity and an employer of labor.

To make corporations truly” free and democratic ” would be to effectively take all the rights of ownership of property away from the shareholders and bestow it, unearned, upon the employees, leaving the shareholders voiceless and powerless. Of course, in the case of employee owned corporations, this is a moot point. I realize in the case of the small investor this is not unlike the current situation where most do not bother to exercise their current stockholder voting rights anyway and are holding the shares purely as a speculative venture; but there is a not insubstantial number of venture capitalists who really do make significant investments to build and grow corporations whose contribution, vision and risk-acceptance is the vital part of the free-market.

That being said, in terms of management practice Mr. Berman is correct, in my opinion. Hierarchical and bureaucratic forms – vertical organizations – are rigid, uncreative, power-centralizing organizations that by preferring autocracy, sacrifice huge creativity gains by not allowing and trusting to a flexible, autonomous, collaborative and horizontally organized work environment. Much employee utility remains untapped as workers are merely cogs in a machine. It was a good model for the second-wave, mass-production, industrial societies circa 1800 -1950 once decried by Ortega y Gasset but today it is an anachronism headed for the graveyard of history.

Excellent post by Mr. Berman, I encourage you to make his blog a regular stop.