No Friends but the Kurds? The Biden Problem in Democratic Iraq Policy

http://electroniciraq.net/news/opeds/No_Friends_but_the_Kurds_The_Bid...

According to the Democratic Party platform presented in August, it is the goal of the party "to renew American leadership in the world" through rebuilding "the alliances, partnerships, and institutions necessary to confront common threats and enhance common security." Moreover, "needed reform of these alliances and institutions will not come by bullying other countries to ratify American demands. It will come when we convince other governments and peoples that they, too, have a stake in effective partnerships. It is only leadership if others join America in working toward our common security." This seems to be a step towards increased multilateralism, as well as a greater focus on searching for foreign-policy solutions that resonate with popular sentiment in the areas they apply to, instead of imposing an American agenda.

In the case of Iraq, the logical operationalization of this program would be to 1.) Listen to credible representatives of the Iraqi people as far as possible in finding a way to terminate the US military presence there; and, 2.) Help the Iraqis reverse imbalances and biases in Iraqi politics and artificial institutions of government and political arrangements that were introduced with the help of formidable military power during the Bush era between 2003 and 2008. It should be stressed that the second point is just as important as the first one: even if security has improved in Iraq over the past year, in terms of political institutionalization the country has been in steep and continuous decline since the formation of the governing council in 2003, with the current climate best described as asphyxiating and certainly not the "breathing space" promised by the "surge". It is the American-sponsored system of ethno-sectarian shares (muhasasa) rather than the Iraqis themselves that must shoulder most of the responsibility for the stalemate in parliamentary politics in Baghdad and the failure to pass crucial legislation on oil, provincial elections and revision of the Iraqi constitution. On most of these issues, cross-sectarian majority alliances that could have produced legislative results are in fact in the making, but they stand no chance of succeeding due to the Byzantine system of minority vetoes introduced through the 2005 constitution - vetoes that by the way are no longer being used to guard the assumed "ethno-sectarian interests" they ostensibly were designed to protect, but rather serve to perpetuate the hegemony of three or four big political parties representing only 90 or so Iraqi parliamentarians out of 275 - the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and Daawa. It is critically important that Democratic policy-makers understand the nature and extent of these problems: without a minimum of arrangements designed to put Iraq back on its track it is simply impossible to withdraw US forces and assume that the status quo ante of April 2003 - a liberated Iraq free to make its own choices - has been restored.