THINGS FALL APART What do we do if Iraq Implodes? Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack* August 2006 By any definition Iraq is already in a state of civil war. However, it is not yet at a Lebanon- or Bosnia-like level of all-out civil war and the differences in degree matter. The turmoil in Haiti, for instance, can be labeled “a civil war,” but relatively few people have died or been driven from their homes. Moreover, not all civil wars have the same strategic impact. Strife in Nepal and Sudan has been bloody, but has occurred in peripheral regions and so does not affect U.S. and Western strategic interests directly. The problem with Iraq is that if the current conflict escalates to all-out civil war, it may prove to be that rare combination of rampant violence in a strategically and economically crucial region. And the trends augur poorly. Inter- and intra-communal carnage claim more and more lives there with each passing month. Perhaps 30,000 Iraqis have already died from strife since the U.S. occupation of Iraq began—and the numbers double when deaths from criminal activity are included. This summer has seen a surge in violence. Refugees and displaced persons number in the hundreds of thousands. While most still cling to the hope that their lives will improve, the numbers are diminishing. The sense of being an “Iraqi,” as opposed to a member of a particular religious, ethnic, or tribal group, is declining too. Militias continue to proliferate as average Iraqis grow fearful of the multiplying reports of ethnic cleansing. Ferocious rejectionists like Muqtada as-Sadr gain new adherents every day—not because Iraqis like what he stands for, but simply because he offers protection and basic services that the Americans and the Iraqi government have failed to provide. Iraq has proven a magnet for Sunni jihadists who admire Usama bin Laden, and they have employed unprecedented numbers of suicide bombings with devastating effect. The wealthy, including those recently enriched by graft and organized crime, are sending their money out of the country as quickly as they can, along with their wives and children. The only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into a Lebanon- or Bosnia-like maelstrom is 135,000 American troops, and even they are merely slowing the fall at this point. Unless the United States and the new government of Iraq take dramatic action to reverse the current trends, the internecine conflict there could easily worsen to the point where it spirals into a full-scale civil war that threatens not only Iraq, but also its neighbors throughout the oil-rich Persian Gulf, with instability, turmoil and war. This degeneration into all-out civil war is still not inevitable (although the point of no return may be drawing near), and we have laid out in considerable detail elsewhere our visions of alternative courses for the United States to pursue.** We desperately hope to see this scenario * Daniel L. Byman is the Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a non-resident senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution. Kenneth M. Pollack is Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. ** See Kenneth M. Pollack, “The Right Way: Seven Steps Toward a Last Chance in Iraq,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 2006. Also see Kenneth M. Pollack and the Iraq Strategy Working Group of the Saban Center for Middle averted, and we are heartened by signs that some American and Iraqi officials, particularly in the U.S. military, recognize the grave problems we face in Iraq and are exploring options to change course. However, given how many mistakes the United States has already made, how much time we have already squandered, how difficult the task is, and how bad things have already gotten, we cannot be confident that even a major course correction from Washington and Baghdad will avert a full-blown civil war in Iraq at this point. With this in mind, the next question that the United States may have to face is what to do if in spite of (or because of) all our efforts, Iraq explodes into all-out civil war. The Threat from a Civil War A full-blown civil war in Iraq would have many disastrous repercussions for the United States, but some would be much worse than others. Without question, a wider Iraqi civil war would be a humanitarian nightmare. Based on the experiences of other recent major civil wars such as those in the former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and elsewhere, we should expect hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die with three to four times more wounded. The same experiences suggest that refugees, both internally and externally displaced, will likely number in the millions. The United States has intervened in other civil wars to stop tragedies on this scale. Of course, an Iraqi civil war will be even more painful for Americans to bear because, if it happens, it will be our fault. We will have launched the invasion and then failed to secure the peace that will have produced the civil war. For years to come Iraqis, Americans, and indeed most of the world will point their fingers at the U.S. government. Our efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East will be badly damaged. Americans may argue that what happened in Iraq was not a good test of democracy in the Arab world, but many Arabs are unlikely to see it that way. In particular, both the autocrats of the region and their Islamist political opponents will use the outbreak of full-blown civil war in Iraq to argue that democratization is a recipe for disaster—ignoring all of the risks that democracy’s more repressive alternatives entail in terms of breeding more terrorists and more political instability in this troubled part of the world. A full-blown civil war in Iraq could lead to the loss of most or all Iraqi oil production. Iraqi insurgents, militias, and organized crime rings are already wreaking havoc with Iraq’s production and export infrastructure, generally keeping Iraqi production below prewar levels of about 2.2 million barrels per day. Larger and more widespread conflict would almost certainly drive down Iraq’s export figures even farther. Unfortunately, there may not be enough spare capacity left elsewhere to cover lost Iraqi production. Thus, all-out civil war, even if it could be contained in Iraq, would drive oil prices even higher than they are today, possibly over $100 per barrel. However, the greatest threat that the United States would face from an all-out civil war in Iraq is the problem of spillover. Spillover is the tendency of civil wars to impose burdens, create instability, and even trigger civil wars in other, usually neighboring, countries. A civil war that did nothing but consume Iraq for 5, 10 or even 15 years would be tragic and painful but not an actual threat to the United States. But civil war in Iraq could drag down its neighbors as well. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran are all major oil producers experiencing East Policy, A Switch in Time: A New Strategy for America in Iraq, (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2006) and Daniel Byman, “Five Bad Options for Iraq,” Survival (Spring 2005). 2 troubling political and economic problems. Jordan is an equally fragile political system in a critical location. We may not like the Syrian regime, but it too is in delicate circumstances and its collapse might not serve our interests either. Turkey is also coping with major societal transformations, and it is a NATO ally we have pledged to defend. All of these countries matter a great deal to the United States for one reason or another, especially Saudi Arabia, whose oil production is irreplaceable and whose loss as an oil exporter could trigger an economic collapse on the order of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Even low- level strife in Saudi Arabia would roil the markets. Experts on all of these countries worry that the internal problems they already face could cause massive political upheavals. No one should want to find out whether they can also withstand powerful external threats spilling over from a major civil war in Iraq. Managing Spillover As historians have noted since time immemorial, some degree of spillover from civil wars seems hard to avoid. Examples of the phenomenon can be found in works on politics from Thucydides to Machiavelli to Hobbes. However, both the frequency and intensity of spillover vary from conflict to conflict. At one extreme, spillover can mean something as simple and manageable as the loss of trade that countries like Romania and Hungary experienced from the various civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. This was unwelcome, but hardly crippling. At the other extreme, spillover can create interlocking patterns of conflict, with one civil war effectively sparking others in neighboring states. A good example of this phenomenon is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that began in the 1920s and continued even after formal hostilities between Israel and neighboring Arab states ended in 1948. The war produced many forms of spillover including masses of Palestinian refugees (augmented in 1967 by Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza). These Palestinian refugees and their continued attacks on Israel contributed to the 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars, provoked a civil war in Jordan in 1970-71, and when they were defeated and forced to flee to Lebanon, they then triggered the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990.