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3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The way to go in
Iraq By Peter Galbraith
such funds
support the Sunni side in the civil war. In a
speech late last month on the US Senate floor,
Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq's
Shi'ite-led government has gone "out of its way to
bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces" and
that the "strident intervention" of the US Embassy
was required to get food rations delivered to
Sunni towns.
Iraq's mainstream Shi'ite
leaders resist holding new provincial
elections because they know
what such elections are likely to bring. Because
the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections,
they do not control the northern governorate, or
province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni
majority, and they are not represented in
governorates with mixed populations, such as
Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New
elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a
greater voice in the places where they live, and
the Shi'ites say they do not have a problem with
this, although just how they would treat the
militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from
clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections
in the Sunni governorates even though it means
they would lose control of Nineveh and have a
much-reduced presence in Diyala.
The US
benchmark of holding provincial elections would
also require new elections in southern Iraq and
Baghdad. If they were held, Hakim's Shi'ite party,
the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine
southern governorates, would certainly lose ground
to Muqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad,
and new elections would almost certainly leave his
followers in control of Baghdad governorate, with
one-quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's
decentralized constitution gives the governorates
enormous powers and significant shares of the
national budget, if they choose to exercise these
powers.
New local elections are not
required until 2009, and it is hard to see how
early elections strengthening Muqtada, who is
hostile to the United States and appears to have
close ties to Iran, serve US interests. But this
is precisely what the Bush administration is
pushing for and Congress seems to want.
Constitutional revision is the most
significant benchmark, and it could break Iraq
apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79% of
voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the
product of a Kurdish-Shi'ite deal: the Kurds
supported the establishment of a Shi'ite-led
government in exchange for Shi'ite support for a
confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and
other regions, such as the one the SIIC hopes to
set up in the south, are virtually independent.
Since there is no common ground among the
Shi'ites, Kurds and Sunnis on any significant
constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis,
such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds
or Shi'ites. Since voters in these communities
have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they
are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised
constitution has no chance of being enacted, but
its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's
three groups.
Constitutionally, Iraq's
central government has almost no power, and the
Bush administration is partly to blame for this.
When the constitution was being drafted in 2005,
the United Nations came up with a series of
proposals that would have made for more workable
sharing of power between regions and the central
government. The US Embassy stopped the UN from
presenting these proposals because it hoped for a
final document as centralized as (and textually
close to) the interim constitution written by the
Americans.
When the constitution finally
emerged in its present form, then-US ambassador
Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several
Sunni leaders whereby, in exchange for Sunni
support for ratification, there would be a
fast-track process to revise the constitution in
the months following ratification to meet Sunni
concerns. Like the Bush administration, the Sunnis
want a more centralized state. While the US
insists that constitutional revision is a moral
obligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to
their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they
voted against ratification of the current
constitution.
With input from the UN
(belatedly brought back into the process last
year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab
Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) is
considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan
of many of its powers, including its right to
cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable
in its own territory, and to control its own oil
and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq
declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab
Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.
Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited
procedures, constitutional revision may be the
final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If
approved by the CRC, the constitutional amendments
will be subject to a vote in Parliament as a
single package and then to a nationwide
referendum. Kurdistan's voters are certain to
reject the proposed package (or any package
affecting Kurdistan's powers), and this could push
tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open conflict.
Kurdish non-governmental organizations, who ran a
2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a
"No" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to
Iraq" vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the
White House graded the CRC's work as
"satisfactory", an evaluation that was either
grossly dishonest or, more likely, out of touch
with Iraqi reality.
For the most part,
Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or
uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach
agreement on the benchmarks because their
constituents don't agree on any common vision for
Iraq. The Shi'ites voted twice in 2005 for parties
that seek to define Iraq as a Shi'ite state. By
their boycotts and votes, the Sunni Arabs have
almost unanimously rejected the Shi'ite vision of
Iraq's future, including the new constitution. The
Kurds envisage an Iraq that does not include them.
In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99% of them
voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the
January 2005 referendum, 98% voted for an
independent Kurdistan.
But even if Iraq's
politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this
wouldn't end the insurgency or the civil war.
Sunni insurgents object to Iraq being run by
Shi'ite religious parties, which they see as
installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and
wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the
Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the
Shi'ites apostates who deserve death, not power.
The Shi'ites believe that their democratic
majority and their historical suffering under the
Ba'athist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They
are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom
they see as their long-standing oppressors,
especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are
sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have
killed thousands of ordinary Shi'ites.
The
differences are fundamental and cannot be papered
over by sharing oil revenues, re-employing
ex-Ba'athists, or revising the constitution. The
war is not about those things.
Lost
cause America's war in Iraq is lost. Of
course, neither President Bush nor the war's
intellectual architects are prepared to admit
this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes
their thinking in telling ways.
The case
for the war is no longer defined by the benefits
of winning - a stable Iraq, democracy on the march
in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil
Iranian and Syrian regimes - but by the
consequences of defeat. As Bush put it, "The
consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and
destruction in the Middle East and here in
America."
Tellingly, the Iraq war's
intellectual boosters, while insisting that the
"surge" is working, are moving to assign blame for
defeat. And they have already picked their target:
the American people.
In The Weekly
Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the
neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute,
wrote, "Those who believe the war is already lost
- call it the Clinton-Lugar axis - are mounting a
surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes
ground lost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's
anger by noting that the American people had lost
confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy, as
demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of
both
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