For some reason, people tend to
assume that the status quo has been around for a very, very long time—that it
enjoys the perk of longevity. To mess with it even in part is typically assumed
to “upset the apple cart.” The fear is excessive. A century after World War I,
the fact that many of the extant countries in the Middle East had been
artificially crafted by Britain and France paled under the presumption that those
countries had been around for much, much longer. Accordingly, the fact that the
Kurds voted overwhelmingly in 2017 to secede from Iraq was ignored or dismissed
not only by Iraq, but also by other countries in the region and the United
States. “Baghdad and most countries in the region had condemned the vote,
fearing it would fuel ethnic divisions, lead to the breakup of Iraq and hobble
the fight against the Islamic State.”[1]
I submit that the fear was overblown and mistaken.
Firstly, ethnic divisions had
been crippling Iraq since the United States toppled Saddam Hussain. An
independent Kurdistan in the northern third of Iraq would have relieved the
pressure such that the Iraqi government would only have to deal with the Sunni-Shiite
struggle for power.
Secondly, even if Iraq itself
would break-up completely, even this outcome would not be so much to fear, as
Iraq itself had been artificially formed by the British after World War I. Put
another way, the salience of the ethnic divisions in Iraq can be taken as an
indication of the sheer artificiality of the state itself. The very notion of a
nation goes along with ethnic clusters rather than forcing such clusters to
form one political culture (to say nothing of getting along).
Thirdly, the pesh merga forces of
the Kurds had fought quite well against the Islamic State, so invigorating the
Kurds by supporting the formation of their own state would have been in the interests
of the United States. Betraying the Kurds by enabling the Iraqi forces to take
Kirkuk and its valuable oil region could be expected to have the opposite
effect. In ignoring the clear will of the Kurds as per the decisive result of
the referendum for secession, the United States betrayed itself, moreover,
given that country’s preachments on behalf of democracy, which entails the
self-determination of We the People.
A century after World War I, the
world had an opportunity to remember that victorious European powers redrew the
political map in the Middle East without taking into account the ethnic
clusters that are naturally so integral to having nation-states. That such
states enjoy a monopoly of power in international relations—the international
realm literally being inter-national—suggests
that the crafting of coherent rather than artificial nations is very important.
Hence, a century out from WWI, the world of nations need not simply assume that
even the break-up of a Middle Eastern country would somehow be the collapse of
something that has always been around and would therefore be catastrophic. Put
another way, a country formed by a European power should not enjoy default
status because the formation itself can be viewed as problematic, evidenced by
the ensuing ethnic strife. Admittedly, this does not hold in every country
formed by Britain or France (e.g. Jordan), but where a country is
strife-ridden, the application of nation itself
is problematic; ethnic pushes for independence should not have to face the
inertia of the status quo in such a case.
[1]
David Zucchino, “Iraqis Capture Key Kurdish City with Little Fight,” The New York Times, October 17, 2017.
