Peter Galbraith Interview On Iraq

Peter Galbraith, a former State Department official, was interviewed on PBS News Hour on Tuesday. He favors a decentralized partition for Iraq. He makes a very good argument for this position when you look at it from where we are now in Iraq. The damage has been done, there are no good outcomes just bad or worse. It can be streamed here: PBS News Hour. Excerpt of transcript: JIM LEHRER: You favor a form of decentralized partition for Iraq. Why? PETER GALBRAITH: The country has already broken up. And actually, I'm opposed to using U.S. resources to try to put it back together again. Kurdistan in the north is already a de facto independent state. It has its own elected government. It has its own army. It flies its own flag. The Iraqi army is not allowed to go to Kurdistan. The Iraqi flag is banned there. The Shiite south is governed by the Shiite religious parties who enforce an Iranian-style Islamic law with militias. It's also not governed from Baghdad. Baghdad itself is the front line of a civil war divided between a Shiite east and a Sunni west, and the Sunni center is a battleground between the coalition and Sunni insurgents. So the country has already broken up, and this result is actually incorporated into the Iraqi constitution. The constitution creates a virtually powerless center -- it doesn't even have the power to tax -- and very strong regions that are allowed to have their own armies, where regional law is superior to central government law on almost all matters, and where the regions have substantial control of their own oil. So if that's the result that has been endorsed by the Iraqi people, I don't see why the United States should try to put the country back together. Dividing into three nations JIM LEHRER: So specifically, then, you would divide it into three independent nations? PETER GALBRAITH: I think eventually Kurdistan will become an independent country. This is the result that is desired by almost all the Kurdish people. They voted in January 2005 in a referendum 98 percent for independence. But as with regard to whether the Sunnis and Shiites have separate states, both of these groups consider themselves as Iraqi. The trouble is they have very different visions of what Iraq should be, and that's why, if you keep a unified Arab Iraq, it seems to me that that's a formula for endless war. If you allow each of these entities to have very substantial self-government or, perhaps if they so choose, independence, it seems to me that that is a better way for each of these communities to protect their own interests and a way to minimize conflict. JIM LEHRER: In other words, they would have no reason to fight anymore? PETER GALBRAITH: There's going to be fighting over the boundaries, but right now there's a full-scale civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites over the control of Arab Iraq. Allowing each group to run their own affairs, it's not going to solve the problem, but it provides the best opportunity to minimize it.