How Iraq Can Define Its Destiny

By ALI A. ALLAWI
NYT

Baghdad

THE Iraq the United States left behind last month is dramatically different from the country it invaded in 2003. Gone are the comforting simplicities of the “war on terror” and democracy building. The geopolitical context that America has bequeathed to Iraq is now defined by five critical challenges.

First, Iraq is at the center of the American-Iranian confrontation; it is the only place where the American military has faced off directly against Iranian-backed militias.

Second, it stands in the middle of the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional supremacy. The Saudi royals oppose the current Iranian government but not necessarily the Iranian system itself; they might happily co-exist with a different Iranian leadership, as they did during the 1990s.

Third, as Turkey reasserts itself in the Middle East, both to counter Iran and to promote its own vision of modernizing Islamism, Iraq is in the middle once again. Turkey is a patron to the large Sunni-dominated Iraqiya parliamentary bloc and the biggest source of investment in the Iraqi Kurdistan region. And it is intimately involved in the affairs of the Kurdistan Regional Government, the K.R.G., in order to keep close tabs on Turkey’s own Kurdish separatist movement, which is based there.

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