A Fiefdom of Foggy Bottom?

Iraq has been a single entity since it was fashioned from Mesopotamia in
1921. Rumblings of war have concentrated consideration on what will happen to
Iraq if the Ba’ath party is removed. Declarations have been made that Iraq
will remain a single thing. It will not splinter into ethnic regions
mimicking the Balkans in the 1990’s. The U.S. secretary of state has said so.
Other high-placed officials have said so. But …

The president of the United States was always a hyper-power outside of
America. The current president is now also a hyper-power domestically. Given
that the current administration has its party controlling both the House and
the Senate, enormous power resides at the disposal of the White House. Still,
whenever things line up too neatly, human nature intrudes. Since there is
one-party control of the federal government, the fault lines reveal
themselves within that single party.

It seems the secretary of defense and the secretary of state are at odds over
many things. Respectively, the Pentagon and the State Department have
differing plans for what to do in Iraq. Jim Hoagland reports (Houston
Chronicle 11/14/02) that the CIA has placed eight agents in Massoud Barzani’s
Kurdish forces and eight agents in Jalal Talibani’s Kurdish forces. These men
are rival powers in Northern Iraq. Both are Kurds. Both dream of an
independent Kurdistan. This is the north of Iraq, now currently patrolled by
U.S. and British fighter jets. It is no more under the control of Saddam
Hussein than is Kuwait.

The CIA is, it is said, in league with the State Department. The insertion of
these agents may illustrate an attempt to separate Kurdish Northern Iraq as
an area free from the control of the secretary of defense, a fiefdom of the
State Department. If this is the case, what of the claims bruited abroad of
not breaking up Iraq?

Iraq’s appearance as a single country is as unreal in some ways as the
appearance that a single party now rules the United States.

James Clark

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(c) 2002 Millennium Relief & Development Services, vol. 2 no. 30
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