Can the Iraq crisis be resolved?

Photo: AFP

As Iraq's elected legislature is trying to bring about a largely Shiite-led government which will be acceptable to the Sunni and the Kurdish minorities, a look at Iraq's ethnic conflict may be in order.

It is said that Saddam Hussein had been working under impression that he had one asset: Iraq's vast oil reserves and two liabilities: the Shiite Arab majority and non-Arab Kurdish minority. From the day one of his rule, he set out to destroy or counter these two liabilities. Although in 1970, it was Saddam who negotiated the so-called 'March Manifesto' that granted the Kurds considerable autonomy as a way to ending their guerrilla war against Baghdad, he unilaterally decided to renege on it in 1973 and attacked the Kurds triggering renewed Kurdish resistance.

But it was the Shiites who were his main target. As a member of the Sunni Arab minority, which represented only 20 per cent of Iraq's population, Saddam Hussein was well aware of his precarious hold on power. Before Saddam, the ruling Sunni minority and the Shiite majority co-existed in a tenuous but largely peaceful environment. But when Saddam took over power in 1979, he decided to rule Iraq with an iron hand and the Shiites were virtually disenfranchised in their own country.

The wheel of fate turned against Iraq's Shiites in the fall of 1980, when Saddam Hussein, just self-appointed president of Iraq, invaded Iran. He was motivated by both fear and aspiration. He feared that Iran's Shiite revolution might spill over to Iraq, emboldening the Iraqi Shiites to revolt against his minority Sunni rule. Saddam had also his eyes on a bigger prize: Iran's south western province of Khuzestan, populated by mostly ethnic Arabs, containing the bulk of Iran's oil reserves. The Iraqi invasion was one of the most inept military operations in recent times and it failed to occupy the (under-defended) Iranian oil fields. For next eight years, the Iraqis and the Iranians fought a largely stalemated war in which more than a million Iraqis and Iranians perished.

The Iraq-Iran war added to the plight of the Shiites who are increasingly seen as a surrogate of Shiite Iran. Repression of the Shiites increased and many Iraqi Shiite leaders sought refuge in Iran. But after Saddam's defeat at the hands of American-led coalition forces in 1991, the Shiites rose in revolt hoping that the Americans would support their uprising. But the United States refused to intervene and Saddam's Republican Guards simply crushed the Shiites, killing thousands of them.

However, the situation changed dramatically after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Long oppressed Shiites, freed from the Sunni domination, swept the subsequent elections and are now in a position to form a majority government. Of course, this was totally unacceptable to the once-dominant Sunni minority who launched a terror campaign against the Shiites. The Sunni-led insurgents bombed Shiite mosques filled with worshippers. They also attacked the largely-Shiite security forces and Shiite officials in a bid to trigger a civil war in which they think they can prevail because of better organisation and military hardware. The bombing of the Golden Mosque, one of Shiites' holiest shrines finally trigger a civil war and the Shiites retaliated by bombing Sunni mosques and killing Sunni clerics. The Shia-Sunni civil war has finally arrived.

In this war of the sects, the American forces have become only armed bystanders. They are completely powerless to determine the course of war between long-oppressed Shiites and now-deposed Sunnis. As long as the Sunnis refused to accept to share power with the Shiite majority, there can be no end to the conflict. The Shiite majority will not accept any Sunni domination which may be preferable to the Americans because of their concerns about Iran. As Prof. Vali Nasr, of Naval Postgraduate School in California, recently wrote: "Shiites see American policy as unduly influenced by Sunni rulers in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, who have been aggressively lobbying Washington for a greater Sunni role in running Iraq. This has led many Shiites to talk of a 'second betrayal' by the United States, a sequel to what occurred in 1991 when the Shiites rose up against Saddam Hussein only to be butchered as American forces refused to intervene. ... This American desire to placate the Sunnis could hurt US regional ambitions"

Unless the Sunni minority give up their desire to dominate once again the Shiite majority, there will be no peace in Iraq. However, the Shiite majority will have to convince the Sunni and the Kurdish minorities that they don't intend to monopolise power in the name of majority rule and the Sunnis and the Kurds have a say in the government. This will be most difficult task in a country where the minority Sunnis ruled with iron hand and the Shiites majority might think they have a historical opportunity to give the Sunnis a taste of their own medicine. The Americans cannot act as an honest broker as they have lost the trust of both the Shiites and the Sunnis. In fact, the Americans have become a victim of their own success in Iraq. A Shiite-dominated Iraq will inevitably move closer to the Shiite Iran and if the Sunni extremists and Saddam loyalists can somehow able to re-assert their authority (which is highly unlikely), Iraq might become a hostile state like Afghanistan under the Taliban. Both outcomes will be most undesirable for the Americans. They can only hope that something in-between will emerge in an otherwise quagmire of Iraq.