Seven Questions: Jay Garner

FP: Is that in some ways almost an existential dilemma? As Baghdad pushes for more national integration with regions pushing for autonomy, how do you reconcile those two?

JG: When we [Americans] first came in here, had we put this country on a federal system, if we had had a Sunni entity, a Shiite entity, and there already was a Kurdish entity -- if we had done that, and we put in a weak central government that does things that governments do (it delineates currency, it has minimum standards for education and health, sends somebody to OPEC, sends somebody to the U.N., raises a small army, etc.), the power of government would have been in the federal entities. We would have stood a good chance of never going through things that we went through. The Sunnis would have been ethnically, religiously, and tribally comfortable. What we tried to do [instead] is forget about the ethnicities, forget about the religions, forget about the tribes, stir [the Iraqis] all up like a melting pot -- and it doesn't work.

Biden had the right answer; Biden talked about a partition, and that's probably an uncomfortable word, "partitioning," but he didn't mean it that way. He said there ought to be a federal unity among these homogeneous groups, which were the same religion, same ethnicity, and homogeneous tribes. That made a lot of sense. But we didn't do that, and I think we suffered the consequences.

FP: With Biden as the U.S. envoy for reconciliation in Iraq, what priorities should he be pushing for?

JG: No. 1, a referendum on disputed lands, because I don't think you can ever have a stable Iraq as long as you have an unstable Arab-Kurdish border. No. 2, a resolution on the oil law because it's a thorn in everybody's side. No. 3, continue to exert whatever leverage we have on the Iraqi government to get these things done.

Anything that happens here, whether it is Kurds versus Arabs or Shiite versus Sunni -- and those are huge flash points -- is not an Iraqi problem; it's a regional problem. It's huge. It's much greater than Iraq, because if it's Shiite-Sunni you are going to have Iranians on the side of the Shiites and you are going to have the Gulf region on the side of the Sunnis. If it's Arab-Kurdish, you are going to have an ethnic war, and lives will be gone and other countries will get involved because they are going to want to shape how it comes out.

I don't think the [U.S.] administration wants to pull out in 2011, run for the presidency in 2012, and have this whole damned thing blow up on them, you know? So it is good that [U.S. President Barack Obama has] appointed Biden; it's good that he's made a special envoy; and it's good that Biden is drilling in on this. Biden is a guy that has studied a long time. He is more thoughtful about this than the other people, and I think that's a good first step. But you've got to have some leverage to execute that. So whatever leverage we have left, we need to make sure that those flash points are solved before we leave.

PREVIOUS 123