Interview with Pauline Baker, President of the Fund for Peace

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Mark Bruzonsky (MB) This is Mark Bruzonsky and I’m speaking with Pauline Baker. Pauline Baker is the president of the Fund for Peace. Pauline, welcome back. I know that you’ve been in Turkey Recently.

Pauline Baker (PB) Yes, thank you.

MB: As you know, we’ve had quite a week here last week with the General and with the Ambassador and with everybody else speaking up. But before that you issued a report called, The Way Out: A Union of the Iraqi States and you’ve called very clearly and very thoughtfully for an entirely new political order in Iraq, and I wonder if you could just briefly outline that.

PB: Yes, I call for an entirely new political order based on the trend lines that we’ve been seeing ever since the invasion of Iraq. And basically what we are arguing is that ….. the whole argument that soft partition or decentralization is very nuanced but it doesn’t confront the central question which is that neither of the three groups really want to be governed by any of the other groups. And yet there is some sort of logic in staying together. So what we are proposing is a Union of Iraqi States very loosely modeled on the European Union where there are sovereign components, three sovereign components at least, and each one is recognized as a truly independent and sovereign state with a seat in the United Nations and its own flags and its own security forces and its own revenue. But that they each be part of a larger political order called the Union of Iraqi States in which there is a single economic entity which is funded largely by the oil revenues and that there be an agreed upon formula for dispersing those oil revenues which I think actually might be easier to agree upon once people know they have their own political self government…and that there would be laws that respect minorities, that respect movements, free labor and so forth based on the European model.

MB: Why have you taken this one huge step beyond what is being discussed in Washington, for instance, Senator Biden’s Plan, a confederation, a federal arrangement of Iraq because the very notion of creating individual countries there and that coming from a Western occupation would cause a lot of people in the region to say once again – you guys have come here and told us how we’re going to live.

PB: Well I don’t think we should tell them how they’re going to live. I think that what we should do is add it to the debate. Obviously, it’s the Iraqis who are going to have to decide whether or not they are going to live together and in what way they are going to live together. But I do think that the kind of formula being presented now – I think that Biden is the closest when he talks about decentralization and confederation. But confederations don’t last. There really isn’t a successful confederation in the world now other than Belgium. And that has very unique characteristics to allow it to survive. Our own political experiment started out as a confederation and failed and then we formed a strong federal system.

The reason why a confederation in Iraq’s case probably will not last is because even in a confederation, the security forces have to be controlled by the center. And that means probably a Shiite-dominated security force, which will not solve the problems of the Sunni insurgency and the Sunni resistance and the kind of sectarian violence that we see there now.

MB: How do you envision the division of Iraq taking place? How do you envision the Union of Iraqi States … let’s assume your arguments were persuasive to people here in Washington and to many Iraqis…what would be the steps that would bring it about?

PB: Well it would have to be done through a negotiation and you’d have to have kind of a grand bargain with the neighboring states as well because it can’t survive unless the neighboring states also support it. Henry Kissinger had come out with an op-ed recently in which he proposed a three-tiered track of negotiations: one on the international level, one on the regional level and one with Iraqi parties, which would all debate this and then come together in an orchestrated fashion. That’s one way to do it. Another way to do it would be to decide to talk to Iraqis themselves directly about that. There would be people who would resist it, but, convene a conference where if this political order or formula were not agreeable then what others might be put on the table? But the important thing is to have a vision of a sustainable society. And there isn’t a vision of a sustainable society now. We’re really talking about very fuzzy concepts that are not sustainable and that really do require continued external involvement by military forces.

MB: And what happens to the current Iraqi constitution which does allow for federalism, does allow for the provinces becoming part of regions, but specifically disavows the idea of Iraq breaking up?

PB: Well actually, there’s an awful lot in the current Iraqi constitution that points toward autonomy. And as one commentator said recently, the Kurds took the existing constitutional provision and ran with it. The Shia said, we like this but let’s go softly-softly because we want to bring the Shia in and maybe be able to dominate the whole of Iraq whereas the Sunnis rejected it entirely.

There are already constitutional principles and I would think that if there was an agreement by the Iraqi parties they could amend the constitution to allow this to happen. So there still would be an Iraqi entity – the Union of Iraqi States. But this would really be a very unique political order in which sovereignty would be shared rather than concentrated in the center.

MB: And I gather that’s why you use the European Union as an example. The states have sovereignty, they have UN membership, but nevertheless, the borders are pretty much open and the economic union is pretty vibrant.

PB: Precisely. Now the European Union, as everyone knows came about as a result of negotiation of existing sovereignties to come together and you don’t have that in Iraq now but that is the way the trend lines are heading. And if there’s going to be fragmentation and even the current successes that the administration is pointing to point to fragmentation because the successes are at the local level, not at the center. And if those are the trends, the question is – is it going to happen violently or is it going to happen more peacefully? If they want it to happen peacefully, we are saying that it should be a managed partition, whether soft or hard or whatever way you want it to go. But managed in the sense that all of the interested parties come together and say – how can this be done where we salvage what’s really good in the union – and mainly that’s the economic cooperation which can be the foundation for recognizing minority rights and free movement and property rights, etc., while allowing and recognizing that the grievances that exist in Iraqi society which are extremely deep, can be addressed.

MB: Well speaking of the trend lines, while you were off in Turkey, I read again your report and then listened very carefully to the hours and hours and hours of Petraeus and Crocker testimony – - it was a little hard to find the trend lines that your report outines in what they testified.

PB: Well they are being very selective in what they site. And as you know there is a controversy on even the count. When they decide not to count sectarian deaths, people who are shot in the head, I don’t know what those numbers really mean. But even if you accept their numbers, while there are improvements in the Ambar Province, there is a report in the Washington Post today that says that violence is actually up in the south. So it is kind of a “wackable” situation where the insurgents retreat when there is a high concentration of American forces and destabilize other parts of Iraq where we don’t have a concentration of American forces. So that suggests that the trendlines are still fundamentally in the same direction and that whatever success we have is not sustainable.

MB: Well, the New York Times wrote a pretty harsh editorial after the testimony and they did, I believe use the phrase “cooking the books.” You might use a different phrase, but are you saying that? That that’s what the Bush administration is doing?

PB: Well I’m not saying, certainly, that General Petraeus is doing that and I disagree with people who assault his integrity by saying that HE cooked the books. I don’t believe that at all. In fact I believe that General Petraeus has brought the sanest strategy yet to Iraq. The problem with it is that it is too little too late. It would have been very good had he would have introduced that strategy right after the invasion and we really did make protection of civilians the centerpiece of our strategy. It’s very very hard to do that when Iraq has deteriorated so badly and the institutions have eroded so badly now.

I don’t think they’ve cooked the books, I think they’re just being very selective in what they define as success and not really looking at the whole picture and the fundamental drivers of conflict in Iraq.

MB: Most crucially you mentioned the region and when I asked you, okay, let’s assume that there aren’t alternatives anymore – that it is too late for anything else, and that everyone agrees that something of this kind has to be done whether it is going to be a federal state (not called partition) or whether it’s going to be what you call an entirely new political order? So let’s assume we go down that direction – but the region seems to be boiling – there does not seem to be much interest in Washington for any grand bargain – and all the talk is actually about a much expanded conflict with one report after the other about how the U.S. and Israel are getting prepared to attack Iran.

PB: Yes, that’s very unfortunate and I agree that even the proposal that I am promoting is a long shot. It really does take political will. But if the administration could, in its last month’s in office see the logic in trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat here they may just try as a last ditch legacy to really convene a larger conference and start the kind of diplomacy that even their republican supporters have been promoting. If not, then the hope is that people will hold on until the new administration comes in and is more open to fresh suggestions and fresh approaches about how to do this.

In fact, the denial…the refusal to think of fresh approaches is actually making things a lot worse with Iran – because Iran sees, or calculates, I believe, that it’s inevitable that our troops will be drawn down, that we will not be able to sustain the kind of transition that the administration is talking about and so it’s in its interest to continue to fuel the conflict in Iraq so that it has allies when the power vacuum inevitably will come. And then its allies will fill that power vacuum.

MB: And what would be the ramifications in your view for U.S. interests and for the region if things went the other direction from the grand bargain and the other direction from a negotiated new political order but rather the greater attack on Iran takes place in which many many people around the world are talking about including the French foreign minister yesterday when he basically said to the world, “Prepare for war.”

PB: Yes.

MB: So what would be the ramifications of that taking place, not only for Iraq but for our country’s interest?

PB: Well I think that any pre-emptive attack would be disastrous. I think that even if the world decided that Iran could not be allowed to have nuclear weapons we would have to go through the United Nations. And I think that the folly of not doing that is evident in what has occurred in Iraq. So if it’s true that Iran is tying international opinion it is promoting nuclear weapons then we should present this evidence to the United Nations and get an international action underway.

But any unilateral action or even a collaborative action between the U.S. and some allies would be actually disastrous. It would certainly inflame the whole Muslim world. It would make the situation in Iraq much worse and even if it were a surgical strike and not an occupation, which is what people are talking about, it would have the same net effect politically.

MB: I think that there are people in this city (Washington, DC) …most of them called neocons who actually would see your disastrous scenario as the very one that is needed to truly bring about an entirely new political order – to use your phrase.

PB: Well I’d like them to point out what that political order would be – with some convincing evidence. The only thing that it would be would be to strengthen the radicals in Iran. Any time that there is a foreign attack even the dissidents within a country rally around their own government and it would strengthen the hand of Ahmadinejad and strengthen the hand of those who say we have the right to nuclear weapons and attack shows not only the right but the need to have nuclear weapons to defend ourselves against external aggression. And of course the rest of the Muslim world would see that as another attempt to dominate an Islamic country.

I don’t see any benefit to come out of a preemptive attack on Iran and if there is evidence that they in fact are closer to developing nuclear weapons then I think that we ought to reveal that publicly and shame the Iranians into more compliant behavior with more sanctions.

MB: Well when you ask for making the case – Norman Podhoretz has made it on the cover of Commentary magazine. There have been plenty of other people who have spoken up loudly – we know what the vice president has been pushing this direction for a long time. We know the Israelis very much have been pushing, and AIPAC even had a convention in town not that long ago that “Get Iran” was the central theme of the entire affair, so ….

PB: Did they go to the next step? Did they paint about what happens afterward? Do they really look at the consequences of what they are proposing or is it just sort of follow the end of my nose strategy?

MB: I think they believe they can change the regime in Iran. I think that they believe they can through military force and CIA covert activities control the region, and they can deny anyone else sufficient weaponry to actually challenge them.

PB: Well if you change the regime in Iran – what would the successive regime look like? It certainly wouldn’t be a democracy. It certainly would not be a pro-Western regime. They may get rid of the nuclear establishment but then what? Could the state fall apart? Would you then get a radical regime that’s even more radical than the current one in power? What would it do to the whole relationship in the region in the Israeli Palestinian conflict? It would actually doom any diplomacy there. So they may well paint a picture which looks to them favorable to the west but it doesn’t play out over the long term.

MB: You’ve mentioned the concept of grand bargain – the idea of a regional international conference – you’ve mentioned Henry Kissinger’s approach to this… A grand bargain doesn’t necessarily have to end with Iraq. A grand bargain can involve the need for a Palestinian State…the need for some accommodation with Iran…the need for settling issues with Hezbollah and Lebanon…. So why not actually say, we need a new political order in the region but it has to go beyond Iraq – in fact there were many issues that inflamed the region long before we did our invasion?

PB: Well that’s certainly the ideal. The only problem I see with it is that if you have multiple conflicts going on in the region and you say that you want to wrap them all up in one pretty package then failure in any one could doom them all. And I say that a half a loaf is better than none.

So I would go all of those tracks. And I don’t think you really are going to get a grand bargain of any sort whether it’s the whole region or Iraq or Iran or the Israeli Palestinian conflict unless there is a perception that you have a new foreign policy here in Washington and a new approach to the region here in Washington. Unless that comes about, there’s going to be logjams all over. So, I mean one of the ways to convince them is to open the doors to diplomacy and really start very serious conversations on all of the conflicts. But I wouldn’t make success in one dependent upon success in the others.

MB: What has been the reaction here in Washington among the powers that be and among the think tanks and among the political intellectual elite to your idea of – it’s time for an Iraq Union of Iraqi States and to bite the bullet?

An Iraqi insurgent aims his weapon – Baghdad, Iraq.

PB: Well it’s very interesting. I have seen over the course of I’d say…last year, but more concentration over the last six months, a shift of opinion in thinking about partition…a lot of other think tanks have talked about various other ways of partitioning Iraq. Some don’t use the word partition – some do use the word partition…. So it’s a very sort of subterranean kind of conversation that’s going on because partition to some people is a dirty word. It’s a dirty word because it is thought particularly, I think, by this administration to be equivalent of failure. And we don’t want to be blamed, obviously, internationally for breaking up Iraq.

MB: Well, it’s not only Pauline, not only from this administration, Biden on Sunday went well out of his way the moment the question of partition was asked of him to spend about 30 seconds saying, “No, no, no, no…we are not talking about partition!”

PB: I saw that and he even said and it was incorrect that Les Gelb did not call for partition – in fact he called for partition right after the invasion. So I don’t know what the hang-up is on the word partition… Maybe it’s because Iraqis don’t like the word partition. I don’t know where that hang-up is and if it’s a semantical argument, well then we ought to drop the word and talk about a union of Iraqi States and a new political order and other phraseology that is more acceptable.

Because partition does suggest that it feeds into the radical Islamic ideology which accuses the west of trying to dominate Muslim lands and carve up Muslim lands. And if that’s the case, and I don’t know that it is, but if it is the case then we ought to respect that sensitivity and move on…move beyond it and not get hung up on a semantic argument. But in fact, Biden himself doesn’t call for partition. He does call for decentralization and that’s the only flaw in what he’s calling for because it does still put security in the hands of a central government which would inevitably be dominated by one group, the Shia.

MB: Yes and as you know, Goals for Americans for the past couple of years has also been dealing with these concepts and we’ve been talking about a Republic of Iraq but staying very much away from that code word “partition” because that in itself seems to … it’s almost a fighting term you mention it and no longer is there a rational discussion about…okay so what can we do? Which is why we get back to Federalism, which is why we get back to the concept of States within a union – not on the model of the European Union but it’s a bit presumptuous of Americans, but more on our model, where we have a federal capital – you and I are living here – and where we have autonomous states… Granted in Iraq they may have more power than our states do, but nevertheless, the sovereignty continues to be one state, we’re not talking about partition, we’re not opening ourselves to the historical …. to being accused of – you invaded this country, and then you partitioned it and divided it and Balkanized the Middle East even further than was done before.

PB: Well, I don’t think we Balkanized it. I think the Iraqis Balkanized it and history will show that.

MB: I meant the region – going back to the Paris Peace Conference.

PB: Right…oh the region…right. Well, it’s a fair argument and I commend you for all of the proposals you put on the table but I say again, I don’t think it will work because our model, our kind of federalism has a very strong central government. And the kind of checks in power that we have developed have taken hundreds of years to develop. There is no culture of it. There are no shared values to do it in Iraq…. And more importantly, Iraq’s experience has broken trust among the groups. And you have to have a certain level of public trust in your institutions and in the people who run them to make Federalism work. And the confidence that if you have a dispute – you have a grievance – you have several ways of redressing that grievance that will be handled institutionally through the courts, through the legal process, through the press, through the legislature… Several ways of doing it.

That confidence, that trust does not exist in Iraq. In fact, quite the opposite. Fears have grown, hardened identities have grown, the desire for revenge has grown. So while that may have been a viable option after the invasion and in fact, I have come to the partition position very reluctantly over the course of years. I was not in favor of it right after – I thought that Iraq could be held together at that time. But too much has happened. And the Iraqis, of course, if they could pull their act together and say, yes, we want federalism, and we’re going to act to make it happen, then, all the better. But in fact just the opposite has happened.

They have had an outline for a federal state and they haven’t acted to implement it – to make it happen. So what has happened is just the reverse, that in fact, everything is pulling apart, everything is going local. And there is a power vacuum at the center, the government is paralyzed and external parties are filling that power vacuum. So I would say that it was a desirable outcome and probably the preferred outcome, but at this point in time, I don’t think it can work.

MB: On page three of your report – I’m quoting: “…The conflict is threatening to inflame the entire middle east.” On page five, I’m quoting: “…no amount of reshuffling the deck will save a disintegrating Iraq.”

If we don’t go this direction, if things do continue to disintegrate, if public opinion does continue to build, pushing and pushing for some sort of withdrawal without managed partition, what…when you say the conflict is threatening to inflame the entire middle east… what are you suggesting could happen if we don’t get our act together?

PB: Well it’s a little bit of a…I mean there are many scenarios one can paint – but it goes back to what you suggested before. Resentment will grow at Iran’s role in Iraq. Saudi Arabia will also be very concerned so you’ll have a confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab states who fear radicalism coming out of Iran. You’ll have a confrontation between Iran and Iran-backed groups in Israel. And you’ll have a new Palestine and a new Palestinian population of exiles and refugeed Iraqis who will not be able to go home because the war will go on and you’ll have carnage in Iraq of a wider scale than you have now. And I think that it will inflame the entire region.

MB: …If things move in that direction…

PB: …if things move in that direction and this is a kind of attempt to look at that in a cold way and say how can we bring it back from the brink?

MB: Because it’s not only that – you’d have oil prices soaring..

PB: Absolutely.

MB: …you’d have worldwide economic recession if not depression. God knows what that would do to the various political systems and the various tensions not only to our situation here at home… So we’re in a situation that is extremely more difficult and dangerous than we were just four or five years ago.

PB: It’s very inflammatory and I don’t think that we can predict with any certainty what the consequences would be because we have had a lot of surprises. But I do think that it’s very unlikely that as things spin out of control that it will be self correcting.

MB: Well, Pauline Baker, thank you very much. It’s been an extremely interesting discussion with you and your report – The Way Out: A Union of Iraqi States – is available at your website: fundforpeace.org.

PB: Yes, thank you.

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