Guest Post by Michael J.W. Stickings
Nothing seems to be going right in Iraq, militarily or politically, and yesterday there was yet another setback:
Talks over the Iraqi constitution reached a breaking point on Thursday, with a parliamentary session to present the document being canceled and President Bush personally calling one of the country’s most powerful Shiite leaders in an effort to broker a last-minute deal.
Mr. Bush intervened when some senior Shiite leaders said they had decided to bypass their Sunni counterparts, as well as Iraqi lawmakers, and send the document directly to Iraqi voters for their approval.
The calls by Shiite leaders to ignore the Sunnis’ request for changes to the draft constitution provoked threats from the Sunnis that they would urge their people to reject the document when it goes before voters in a national referendum in October.
At day’s end, American officials in Washington declared that the Iraqis had made “substantial and real progress” toward a deal on the constitution. And senior Iraqi leaders said they would make a last-ditch effort on Friday to strike a deal.
But after so many days of fruitless negotiations, some senior political leaders here suggested that time had run out.
But what did the Bush Administration expect? Oh, right, that greeting as liberators that never quite managed to materialize. But this is what you get when you go in without much of a plan and try to impose some sort of haphazardly-designed liberal democracy on a country that hasn’t exactly had much experience with either liberalism or democracy. No, this is not to say that democracy can’t work there, just that doing it this way is bound to lead to disaster. Did anyone around Bush have the good sense to bring up Yugoslavia, for example, an artificial country ruled for decades by a strongman that, with the death of said strongman, descended into the abyss of ethnic and religious warfare? To me, that seems like an appropriate analogy, whatever the obvious differences.
So what do we have here? The Sunnis, formerly the minority rulers in Saddam’s regime, are now being locked out of Iraqi rule by the Shiite-Kurdish coalition. The Shiite majority may yet push the proposed constitution to a referendum, but then what? Either the Sunnis vote it down, which is unlikely, or they end up alienated altogether. And beyond that? Who knows? The Kurds in the oil-rich north, the Shiites in the oil-rich south, perhaps under Iranian influence, and the Sunnis still in their triangle of discontent around Baghdad in the center — perhaps? But is such federalism possible? Are we not more likely to see the collapse of Iraq into choas, especially if, as I suspect, Bush will pull a significant number of American troops out prior to the 2006 mid-terms?
Let me be clear: I’m not defending the Sunnis here, nor suggesting that Iraq would be better off under the genocidal Saddam, I’m just pointing out that nothing that’s happening is really all that surprising, given even a cursory understanding of Iraqi history and culture. The Bush Administration had its collective head up its… uh, stuck in the sand, as we all know by now, but it looks more and more as if Iraq will end up as the living nightmare of a failed foreign policy.
For, contrary to the claims of Bush and Rumsfeld, Iraq in 2005 is nothing like American in 1787, and this proposed constitution will hardly even begin to resolve Iraq’s fundamental political problems. Prepare for the worst. It may yet be upon us.