[Mb-civic] Iraq on the Brink - Harold Meyerson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Iraq on the Brink

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, August 17, 2005; Page A13

It looks increasingly as if President Bush may have been off by 74 years 
in his assessment of Iraq. By deposing the dictatorship of Saddam 
Hussein, Bush assumed he would bring Iraq to its 1787 moment -- the 
crafting of a democratic constitution, the birth of a unified republic. 
Instead, he seems to have brought Iraq to the brink of its own 1861 -- 
the moment of national dissolution.

No, I don't mean that Iraq is on the verge of all-out civil war, though 
that's a possibility that can't be dismissed. But the nation does appear 
on the verge of a catastrophic failure to cohere. The more the National 
Assembly deliberates on the fundamentals of a new order, the larger the 
differences that divide the nation's three sub-groups appear to be.

It's not the small stuff that they're sweating in Baghdad. They can't 
agree on whether the new Iraq should be a federation, with a largely 
autonomous Shiite south and Kurdish north, or a more unified state, 
which the Sunnis prefer. They can't agree on just how Islamic the new 
republic should be, and whether the leading Shiite clergy should be 
above the dictates of mere national law. They can't agree on whether 
religious or state courts should hold sway in Shiite-dominated regions, 
or even the nation as a whole; they can't agree on the rights of women. 
They can't agree on the division of oil revenue among the three groups. 
They can't agree on whether there should be a Kurdish right to secede 
enshrined in the constitution.

In short, they can't agree on the fundamentals of what their new nation 
should be. And the more they deliberate, the less they agree on.

These are not unanticipated disagreements. Before the war began, many 
critics of Bush's rush to war, including some in the State Department 
and the CIA, argued that while overthrowing Hussein would be relatively 
easy, building a post-Hussein Iraq would be devilishly difficult. Bush's 
defenders argued that Iraq was a largely secular land in which many 
Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds lived together amicably and frequently 
intermarried. They weren't entirely wrong, but one could have made the 
same argument about Tito's Yugoslavia before it dissolved into genocidal 
violence. They missed the deep resentments and the growing 
fundamentalism that Hussein's thugocracy smothered, and that exploded 
once he was removed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/16/AR2005081601182.html?nav=hcmodule

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