The following is a response taken from an online debate for The New Republic between AEI resident fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht and Peter W. Galbraith, former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia and author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (2006).

Resident Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht

It's always a pleasure to spar with you. Implicit in your piece is an assumption that is undeniable: There is nothing particularly holy about modern nation-states in the Muslim Middle East. Their autocratic governments have usually been much more effective at immiserating their citizenry than improving the spirit and health of the commonweal. It's not hard to understand why the Islamic identity has gained ground on secular nationalism in probably every Muslim state in the region. (The only exceptions may be the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia, where overzealous, relentlessly modern state sponsorship of religion has allowed a secular identity to remain competitive.) For the Kurds in Iraq, nationalism never made much sense, since the idea of Arabism was inextricably tied to the essence and beauty of being Iraqi. I've always thought that you have been among the most honest observers of the Kurdish condition: Iraq for the Kurds has been a naqba (to borrow from the Palestinians): a "catastrophe" that has maimed the body politic and the culture. (Would that Iraq's Kurds had been so fortunate to live under the oppressive rule of Ankara's generals.) It would be enormously unwise for Iraq's Kurds to exchange de facto independence with an explicit declaration of national sovereignty. They don't need to anger Ankara, Tehran, or Iraq's Sunni and Shia Arabs, who may look even more askance at such an action than either the Turkish Army or Iran's mullahs. But we would certainly understand if their emotions got the better of them and they decided to divorce themselves irrevocably from Mesopotamia.

This is the part of your argument that I can understand. Iraq's Kurds are a distinct people who are unlikely to have a happy home in any centralized Iraqi state. It's unclear to me how the Kurds can easily demarcate their borders in a very loosely knit federal arrangement. Kirkuk has only become the Kurdish Jerusalem since the discovery of an ocean of oil underneath it. There are Arabs and Turkomans all over the Kurdish zone, and neither cares to be incorporated inside a noticeably enthusiastic and exclusionary Kurdish union. Since the winter of 2003--but especially in the last year--the Kurdish powers have been pushing Arabs out of Kirkuk and elsewhere. (And, yes, the Kurds are also welcoming some Iraqi Arabs into their lands.) Iraqi Arabs now cannot visit Kurdistan without a Kurdish sponsor. This process is becoming ugly. The possibility that the Kurds will make a serious misstep against the Arabs and Turkomans isn't small, which could seriously embitter--possibly endanger--any lasting peaceful relationship with either Ankara or Iraqi Arabs. It also could jeopardize the rather obvious designs of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the two clan-based satrapies that rule Kurdistan, to enlist the United States in their defense against all aggressors. But, for the sake of argument, let us assume that the Kurds, who have a long track record of killing each other and calling in outsiders to abet their internecine strife, can pull this off and sustain their de facto Kurdish republic. That's as far as you go, Peter.

Leave the hills of Kurdistan for the Arabic-speaking flatlands, and you're in trouble. The nationalist idea is violently alive and well among Iraq's Sunni and Shia Arabs. You cannot have a geographic split among these two religious groups--and it is essentially a religious split, since, culturally, the two groups are the same--if they themselves do not want it. You appear to be making a very Western, secular mistake in assuming that nationalism and a strong religious identity and faith are mutually exclusive. Among the Sunni and Shia Arabs of Iraq, they are not. (You also regularly err in your association of the Iraqi and Iranian Shia, implying a growing subservience of the former to the latter. In all probability, the distance between the two--even with Iran's closest Shia allies in Iraq--is going the other way as the Arab Shia gain more self-confidence and fear the Sunni Arabs less.) You will not find any major religious figure on either the Iraqi Sunni or Shia side who favors the type of split you envision. And, unless you do, your plan--as theoretically appealing as it might be (it's very Wilsonian to believe that, if you give people land, they'll stop fighting)--has no legs.

The forced and voluntary migration of thousands of Sunnis and Shia from mixed neighborhoods into more homogenous zones hasn't really changed the vast overlap on the ground in the central region of Iraq, where Sunnis and Shia remain in a mélange. Sectarian strife is constantly growing, in part because Sunnis and Shia can still easily strike each other. Baghdad remains at the center of the Iraqi Arab mind, for both Sunnis and Shia (they each see it as their city), and there is no way in hell you are going to divide that town. If you think Moqtada Al Sadr is a problem now, just wait until the United States tries to force the partition of Baghdad, and Iraq, into Sunni and Shia zones. Among other things, Sadr is a rampaging nationalist--hence his constant mocking of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and many of the moderate Najaf-based clerics around him for their Iranian ancestry. Killing Sunnis and defending the Iraqi Arab nation from infidel invaders have become the rallying cries for Sadr's Mahdi Army and its numerous, even more undisciplined cohorts. Are you suggesting, Peter, that the U.S. Army deploy its troops with the explicit mission of separating the Arab Sunni and Shia communities and devote its firepower and training programs to ensuring that Sunnis and Shia have competing militaries? Led by Donald Rumsfeld and General John Abizaid, the U.S. Army in Iraq can't even make a dent in the Sunni insurgency, and now you are going to add to their mission by taking on much of the Shia community, which has no sympathy whatsoever for the type of rigid separation you envision?

It is a dubious proposition to suggest that the efforts of Abdul Aziz Al Hakim and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) for a large autonomous region in the south means that Hakim, SCIRI, and others who have backed this plan have given up on the idea of one Iraq, particularly one Arab Iraq. They haven't. Hakim is after a power base. Such an entity doesn't represent for him--or for any other Shia that I can find--a geographic expression of a serious religious or regional affection. The autonomy-loving people of Basra and its surrounding areas are not quite in this camp, but that's a completely different issue from what Hakim has advanced. Many Shia, both religious and secular, have liked the autonomy idea, since it gives them a redoubt where the Arab Sunnis can no longer interfere. And the Kurds have backed Hakim not because they think this plan will bring peace to the Arabs, but simply because they are selfishly interested in reinforcing the idea of federalism among the Arabs. It's important to remember that this idea of a Shia zone was developed in 2004, at a time when the Shia were still fearful of the Arab Sunni rejectionists and holy warriors. They had not yet thrown off the Saddam-era fear of a Sunni return to power or of the possibility that the Arab Sunnis--through their greater martial virtue and communal discipline--could slaughter their way back to power. When Hakim first met with President Bush in Washington after the liberation, he stressed the need for the United States to stay the course in Iraq, Today, the statements of Hakim to pay attention to are those that depict the United States as an obstacle to an effective counterinsurgency. (Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki has made similar allusions.) It's a good bet that Hakim and others in SCIRI now believe that they can more effectively handle the Arab Sunni rejectionists and holy warriors on their own, since they are not restrained by America's humane rules of engagement. For what the Sunnis have done, these Shia, who now perhaps represent a majority of the community, intend a horrific vengeance.

If the Americans start to withdraw from Iraq--if they just announce that they are leaving and give a timetable--we are probably going to see the violence in Iraq explode. Take the killing rate of today and triple it--that would be a reasonable guess of where the Iraqis will be within six months of any "redeployment" of U.S. troops. A Shia conquest of the Arab parts of Iraq is only a matter of time. The centripetal eminence of Baghdad and the Sunni suicide bombers will guarantee this. Baghdad will force the Shia to take Ramadi, and, once they take Ramadi, the rest of the Sunni triangle will essentially be a mop-up operation. Mosul will be challenging, but, with the resources of the Shia community and the killing temperament developed from the conquest of Baghdad and Ramadi, Arab Shia forces will take down the city. We should certainly expect staunchly Sunni states like Jordan and Saudi Arabia to back Iraq's Sunni Arabs. In such a collision, Iran will back the Arab Shia community, and we can expect the Shia to take possession of the vast majority of the heavy weaponry left over from Saddam. The Sunni resistance will certainly be ferocious, further enflaming and radicalizing the Shia. You can expect Shia Iraqi nationalism to be enraged--and remember, the Shia have always viewed themselves as the progenitors of Iraqi nationalism (they, not the Sunnis, were the core of the anti-British jihad after World War I). The odds are decent that, once this nationalism becomes battle-hardened and successful, it will aim for the Kurds, too. I certainly wouldn't want to bet that the Americans--who, by that time, will have "retreat from Iraq" fully embedded in their DNA--will want to save the Kurds one more time.

You won't get partition, Peter. If the Americans don't change tactics soon--which means adopting a program along the lines laid out by the military historian Frederick Kagan, who has given the best advice on how to win in Mesopotamia--you are going to see carnage that may well rival the body count of the Iran-Iraq war. I wish the Kurds well. They are going to need all of their political acumen, and enormous luck, to escape this maelstrom.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at AEI.