JUST A QUESTION OF HOW BIG THEY WANT TO LOSE:

Islam, Federalism and Oil: What's at stake in the Iraqi constitutional negotiations. (BARTLE BREESE BULL, August 20, 2005, Opinion Journal)

On a broader level, the key subtext to these negotiations is about what has happened since I spent time with the Kurdish commanders 14 months ago. Back then, it was the supreme Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who had, via a personal letter to Kofi Annan, very nearly driven the Kurds out the entire project of a unified Iraq by seeing to it that the TAL was not even mentioned in the Security Council Resolution that ratified the current incarnation of the Iraqi state. Since then, much has changed. For one thing, the TAL has emerged as a real document. Its schedule for Iraq's democratic process, initially considered by many to be a mere paper formality, has proved to be more real in terms of practical politics than the car bombs of the Baathists and Wahhabis.

Perhaps more important, the leadership of Iraq's Kurds and Shiites, who only a year ago were so at odds that the Kurds very nearly abandoned the entire enterprise, have come to agreement on the basic principle that there can be no Iraq if any major group is forced to give up its present freedoms. If the Sunnis don't sign up to this dispensation, with its long and successful precedent under the Ottomans, they will be stuck with the status quo or left in an oil-less, landlocked Sunnistan of their own making, with little succor to expect from an America that is as weary of war as it is of Sunni intransigence.

Even their capacity to dominate a Sunnistan seems dubious.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 20, 2005 12:00 AM