by Chris Narkun
Daily Lobo
While President George Bush addressed a gathering of veterans in Utah and urged Americans to stay the course in Iraq and fight terrorists there rather than in the United States, that country's new political process may have produced a powder keg with the potential to strengthen the insurgency there or, worse, push the country closer to open civil war.
Yesterday's last-minute delivery of the first post-Hussein constitution to the Iraqi parliament will be heralded as a major step toward an inevitable Iraqi democracy by American - and some Iraqi - government officials. But a closer look reveals major issues obscured by the rush to avoid the embarrassment of missing the self-imposed deadline a second time.
Not least of these is the fact that the final wording of the draft has yet to be hammered out, a process which has been given the next three days for completion. This raises the question of what exactly constitutes a submitted draft.
Without such a submission, or another constitutional amendment extending the deadline, the six-month-old parliament would have to be dissolved and new elections held, delaying the Iraqi political process for months and further darkening Iraqi perception of what many consider a state ineffective at governing and providing security.
In addition, this draft appears to have been submitted by the dominant Shiite and Kurdish coalition without the approval of the minority Sunni Arab delegation. This community has been largely responsible for maintaining an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and Americans, including at least three more American soldiers in a bombing and rocket attack Monday.
Even if the constitution is put to a nationwide referendum, any three provinces can veto it with a two-thirds no vote - and Sunni Arabs make up the majority of at least four provinces.
As President Bush continues his weeklong campaign to shore up the ever weaker public support for the war, he continues to draw parallels between the Iraq War and World War II, even as a Republican congressman notes similarities to Vietnam.
While both of these comparisons are fundamentally inexact, neither is as shaky as Bush's comparison of the American constitutional convention and Iraq's struggles to create a founding document, both of which, he said, featured political rivalries and regional disagreements.
True, but late-18th century Philadelphia wasn't wracked by daily cart bombings, and the regional differences between North and South hadn't yet reached the threshold of barely contained slaughter. What the writers of the American Constitution put off for future generations resulted in a war 70 years later - what the Iraqis do or don't address in their deliberations could start widespread sectarian ethnic cleansing in the next several months.
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The final constitution is in danger of being perceived as having ignored Sunni Arab concerns in favor of the larger Shiite and Sunni Kurd communities' desire for a federalism that would further erode the traditional Sunni Arab hold on power in Iraq. Other contentious issues include women's rights and the role of religion in Iraqi law and government - issues which the majority of Shiites, many of whom have close ties to neighboring Shiite Iran, are pursuing vigorously. This may put the United States, with its constant pressure for progress - any progress - in the Iraqi political process, in the awkward position of having toppled a dictator to create an Islamic theocracy with close ties to its oldest and most powerful enemy in the Middle East.
Iraq's complicated political, religious, ethnic and regional conflicts almost guarantee some groups will be unhappy with the shape of the new Iraqi state. Still, overtly steamrolling the faction most responsible for the continuing violence is probably not the most productive way to facilitate an American withdrawal of troops or to avoid an Iraqi future that looks more like Yugoslavia in the 1990s than the United States in the 1790s.
And using rhetoric to play down the hurdles Iraqis face in building a nation - and that this country faces in being able to withdraw - won't make overcoming them any easier.
