Welcome to the quagmire

The Kurds would like to merge the three provinces in which they form a substantial majority into a single canton. They would like to add to it tracts from three other neighboring provinces where there are significant Kurdish populations. Not surprisingly, they would like to annex to this Kurdish super-province the city of Kirkuk and the hundreds of petroleum wellheads around it. Their plan states, "The natural resources located on the territory of the Kurdistan Region, including water, petroleum and subsoil minerals, belong to the Kurdistan Region."

The CPA decided leave the semi-autonomous Kurdish parliament and government temporarily intact in the north as Iraq moved toward self-rule. The future Iraqi government and the constitutional convention will have to hammer out a compromise on Kurdish semi-autonomy. This process will be fraught with dangers for the new Iraqi state, since any decision reached on the disposition of Kirkuk and its petroleum will displease some faction, and all the factions are heavily armed.

Meanwhile, the Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani was growing impatient with the failure of the U.S. to acquiesce in holding early direct elections. Now he played his trump card. On Jan. 15, he had his lieutenants in the southern Shiite city of Basra bring 30,000 disciplined protesters into the streets, demanding direct elections. It was the largest demonstration postwar Iraq had yet seen.

Then on the following Monday, he had 100,000 protesters rally in Baghdad. A mass movement among the Shiites, at a time when the Sunni Arab provinces were the site of a guerrilla war, was precisely the development that the new government had been intended to forestall. Instead it seemed set to provoke it.

In the face of Sistani's demonstration that he could turn out the masses at will, and could keep them at home if he so ordered, the United States and the United Nations suddenly became more cooperative. Kofi Annan agreed to send special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to assess the possibility of elections. Brahimi's team produced a report confirming the American position, that direct elections before June 30 were impossible, much to the disappointment of Sistani and the Shiites.

The U.N., along with the Americans and the Interim Governing Council, worked out a two-stage plan for a new government. Sovereignty would be handed over to an expanded Interim Governing Council in the summer. It would then arrange for direct elections, of the sort that Sistani demanded, in December of 2004 or January of 2005. There would be no provincial council-based elections. Sistani got what he wanted, with only a six-month delay.

The entire point of the hand-over of sovereignty in the summer of 2004, however, had been to create a new Iraqi government with legitimacy. Now, the Coalition would likely be handing power over to its own appointees, most of whom lacked any real grass-roots popularity.

By early March, the Interim Governing Council passed a basic law or interim constitution. It set Islamist Shiites against Kurds and secular women. The women and secularists on the council reversed the earlier decision to abolish civil personal status, reinstating the secular code. The religious Shiite party leaders on the council were so furious that they stormed out of the meeting. They pledged to agitate for Islamic law in subsequent negotiations.

The interim constitution was roundly denounced as illegitimate and a foreign imposition by mosque preachers the following Friday. Kurds in Kirkuk, who mistakenly thought it gave the city to them, fired off their guns in celebration, accidentally killing a Turkmen, and setting off an ethnic riot. Sunni Arab insurgents paid no attention to the document, simply continuing their deadly bombing campaign in a bid to destabilize Iraq so as to expel the Americans and forestall a Shiite and Kurdish takeover of the country. Many Sunni Arab militants are convinced that democratic rule is a big mistake that will allow the rabble of the other communities to dictate Iraqi politics. They seek some sort of Sunni oligarchy, backed up by arms. Since Sunnis have long been the best-educated Iraqis, who occupied high government posts and dominated the officer corps, many are confident they can return to power as a minority regime (though they would insist they are in fact the majority).

Any transitional government that comes to power in Iraq will have to hold elections and will have to arrange for the drafting of a new constitution. All the issues and conflicts that have bedeviled the writing of the basic law will at that point be revisited. A spokesman for one of the holdouts, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, had said that it was thought unnecessary to fight too hard over the text of the basic law, since it was only temporary. The drafters of the permanent constitution will be less willing to compromise because they will have to live with the resulting document for a long time.

If acceptable compromises cannot be reached among the major players, the country could easily fall into chaos. All the leading factions, including the Kurds and the more militant Shiites, have large, well-armed militias at their beck and call. The low-grade guerrilla insurgency of the Sunni Arabs also is likely to continue for some time. It may not, however, be the most challenging issue Iraqis face as they attempt to hammer out a new destiny -- a destiny not imposed on them by the will of the Bush administration.

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