NOT INCOMPETENCE SO MUCH AS IDEALISM:

A knitter's nightmare: Iraq's constitution must weave together a patchwork of interests and ideologies, including the Kurds' (Brendan O'Leary, August 14, 2005, LA Times)

Like the Kurds, many Shiites want regional control over Iraq's oil to ensure that locals benefit. While most of Iraq's black gold is in the southern provinces, Kurdistan also has a lot, especially if the Kurds control the region of Kirkuk. The central government abused its control of oil. Geology and politics thus favor a deal on natural resources between Kurds and Shiites.

So Kurds and Shiites may agree on a viable constitution that would represent the combined interests of more than 80% of Iraq's citizens. Which leaves the Sunni Arabs.

The mostly Sunni insurgents are at war with the majority Shiites, and in their dreams would reconquer Kurdistan. They don't want to be — and cannot be — part of the new constitution. The success of the constitution must be measured by their eventual defeat.

Among the non-insurgent Sunnis, there are no obvious leaders with whom to bargain. A few are liberals, democrats and human rights activists. More are nostalgic for Hussein. Some want to postpone the constitutional negotiations until after new elections to get more Sunnis to participate.

What the Kurdistan Alliance and the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance must do is to make a deal with sufficient protections — for human rights, regional self-government, security arrangements and the distribution of resources — to ensure that enough Sunni Arabs will not oppose the proposed constitution in the October referendum.

But outsiders are not making that sensible bargain easy to strike. Baghdad is awash with foreigners offering advice on how to make Iraq a nation-state. It is unclear that the external organizations are helpful, because they don't see the bargain that must be made.

When Iraqi sovereignty was restored in the spring 2004, the Bush administration was in control. It's not now. But the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, is trying his best to be an authoritative back-seat driver. To finish his job effectively, however, he will have to depart from Washington's script.

The Bush administration wants a centralized Iraq for only two reasons that make any sense. First, to have a counterweight to Iran. (The U.S. had hoped it would also be secular.) That cause is lost. Iran and Shiite Arab Iraq, at least, will be at peace. Second, the administration wants to appease Turkey, which fears an independent Kurdistan. But the best way to discourage an independent Kurdistan is to promote an Iraq that Kurdistan accepts, namely a democratic, pluralist and federal Iraq.

The administration has been neither a competent imperialist nor an intelligent democracy exporter. If it had been run by the ruthless oil-stealing imperialists its opponents imagine, dividing up Iraq and making Kurdistan and "Shiastan" supply the world with oil would have been its strategic choice. If, as it claims, the administration had been interested in promoting a democratic Iraq and transforming the political landscape of he Middle East, it would have supported the Kurdistan Alliance and the United Iraqi Alliance, while encouraging them to make a settlement that was fair to Sunni Arabs, rather than backing the unreformed Sunnis' unappeasable demands.

As negotiations for a constitution near the deadline in Baghdad, the administration must end its incompetence.

A centralized, multi-ethnic, multi-religious Iraq might have been the ideal, but it's not an ideal world. Take the deal that's there to be made and that represents an enormous accomplishment.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 17, 2005 8:00 AM