BAGHDAD — Everyone’s on ten­ter­hooks today as we wait to see what hap­pens with the Iraqi con­sti­tu­tion. Well, every­one in the jour­nal­ist and NGO com­mu­ni­ties, the var­i­ous embassies and the Iraqi gov­ern­ment. Your aver­age Iraqi is prob­a­bly more inter­ested in when the power’s com­ing back on or if the water will run tonight. The con­sti­tu­tion is impor­tant, yes, but there is a dis­con­nect between what’s going on out on the streets and what’s hap­pen­ing in the Green Zone that a con­sti­tu­tion will do noth­ing to fix.
In some ways, how­ever, what the con­sti­tu­tion says is not so impor­tant that it might exist at all. What’s inter­est­ing is what the _process_ of draft­ing the char­ter says about the Iraqi polit­i­cal process. And what it says has some good points and bad ones.
On the one hand, there is no doubt there is a dia­logue going on among peo­ple in a coun­try where agree­ment usu­ally comes with the not-so-subtle nudg­ing of a Kalash­nikov in the kid­neys. Peo­ple who might not oth­er­wise talk are engag­ing with one another. They are the lead­ers and once they fig­ure out how to talk to one another, per­haps they can learn to talk to the Iraqi peo­ple — and then they can lead them.
On the other hand, these same lead­ers are often the heads of mili­tias and these mili­tias are being used to assas­si­nate polit­i­cal oppo­nents. Everyone’s got their the­o­ries as to who killed the two Sunni mem­bers of the con­sti­tu­tional panel last month, but every­one i’ve spo­ken with agrees it was at the hands of a rival mili­tia — either the Shi’ites’ Badr Orga­ni­za­tion, the Kur­dish _pesh merga_ or pos­si­bly Ba’athists.
My point is that the _talking_ is the point, not nec­es­sar­ily the con­sti­tu­tion. That a polit­i­cal process even exists is a bit of a won­der, and it should be seen as wel­come and good news. If a process exists, prob­lems can be addressed, solu­tions found. The actual form of those solu­tions is less impor­tant than the fact a mech­a­nism to find them is in place.
How­ever, a major weak­ness of this process is its reliance on the Amer­i­cans. None of this dia­logue would hap­pen nat­u­rally with­out the heavy prod­ding of the diplo­matic com­mu­nity — pri­mar­ily the Amer­i­cans and the British. The two senior mem­bers of the Coali­tion are keep­ing a smol­der­ing civil war from ignit­ing into full-scale open sav­agery — yes, it can get much worse here — by con­vinc­ing the Iraqis to keep talk­ing. That’s a huge diplo­matic achieve­ment and it’s not high­lighted enough.
The Iraqis are still too divided, too sus­pi­cious of one another to take the ini­tia­tive on their own and get and keep the process going. This, I believe, is a bad sign that the Amer­i­can hope to get the Iraqis on their feet mil­i­tar­ily, eco­nom­i­cally and polit­i­cally is going to be a long time com­ing. The Amer­i­cans are going to be _very_ involved here for a long time. After all, they’re not mid­wif­ing a polit­i­cal process so much as a polit­i­cal cul­ture.
So, I don’t really care what the Iraqi con­sti­tu­tion says. Well, I do, but I care more, how­ever, that it’s eas­ily amend­able because what the Iraqis end up with next year, or even next decade, will prob­a­bly look very dif­fer­ent from the doc­u­ment that comes out today, _inshallah_. And that’s OK. The “Amer­i­can Constitution”:http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html, in many areas, bears lit­tle resem­blance to the orig­i­nal seven Arti­cles.
That’s why the real hard work will come after the draft­ing of the Iraqi char­ter. The Iraqis will have the chal­lenge of cre­at­ing robust, flex­i­ble insti­tu­tions that sup­port demo­c­ra­tic dia­logue. They need an inde­pen­dent judi­ciary, for starters, that will enable the set­tling of the inevitable dis­putes that will arise over women’s rights, the role of Islam and fed­er­al­ism — all issues that may or may not get kicked down the road with this draft. (We’ll see in a few hours.) They need new lead­ers, frankly, who are not exiles but peo­ple who stayed in Iraq dur­ing the Sad­dam regime. And they need a mech­a­nism to come to terms with the Ba’ath Party and the bloody fin­ger­prints it has left on Iraqi society’s throat. This is an issue that will not go away, despite the best efforts of Ahmed Cha­l­abi and it will have to absorbed into the body politic some­how.
And how will all of this affect the insur­gency? Well, to be hon­est, in the short– to medium-term, it won’t do much. It might keep more Sunni fence-sitters from drift­ing into the hos­tile camp, assum­ing a char­ter isn’t pushed through by Shi’ites and Kurds over vocal Sunni objec­tions. (That would send the sig­nal that dia­logue counts far less than sheer num­bers — and why take part in a process that equates demo­graph­ics with des­tiny?)
But the hopes that it will be the start of pulling the rug out from under the insur­gents is not likely to hold water; the Amer­i­cans said the elec­tions in Jan­u­ary would do that and they didn’t. The lull after the elec­tions was not because bal­lot boxes sapped sup­port; it was a retool­ing and rearm­ing period after their elec­tion offen­sive. Then they said the same about the for­ma­tion of the Ja’afari gov­ern­ment — and the insur­gency was ready for it. A newly rested and resup­plied insur­gency has killed more than 4,000 Iraqi civil­ians and secu­rity forces since April 28 when his gov­ern­ment was announced. In the same time period, 266 Amer­i­can troops have died.
What usu­ally ends insur­gency are two things: time and amnesties. Even­tu­ally, insur­gen­cies die out because peo­ple get damn tired. This is the 10 – 12 year span that Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rums­feld men­tioned a cou­ple of weeks ago. And they also end when the exist­ing gov­ern­ment, usu­ally with a knife to its throat, offers an amnesty to rebels once all sides reach the point of exhaus­tion.
My point in all this is not that the nascent polit­i­cal process is point­less — quite the oppo­site. My point is that it has to con­tinue and be seen as robust enough with­out con­stant Amer­i­can stok­ing if the insur­gency is ever going to get tired enough to accept some kind of deal. It has to be seen by Sun­nis, who make up the bulk of the insur­gency, as a real dia­logue and not just a forum where they stand out­side with their noses pressed up against the class look­ing in. Yes, they boy­cotted the elec­tions in Jan­u­ary, and frankly, their cur­rent polit­i­cal flac­cid­ity is their own damn fault. But they have to be shown that it’s OK for them to come in an sit down at the table and that they’ll get a fair hear­ing. Oth­er­wise, Iraq’s Sun­nis might just decide to talk to some­one who _will_ lis­ten to them: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. We’re already see­ing it. Ba’athist cell lead­ers have are los­ing foot sol­diers to the _jihadis_. Any­thing that fur­ther alien­ate sec­u­lar and poten­tially mod­er­ate Sun­nis should be ended.
The talk­ing _has_ to con­tinue — and the Iraqis have to be the ones to con­tinue it. Pres­i­dent George W. Bush can talk about the train­ing of Iraqi secu­rity forces all he wants, but it’s the train­ing of Iraqi politi­cians that’s even more impor­tant. As these guys — for the most part — learn to talk to one another, that’s where the real progress will be made, not on the bat­tle­field. If there is even a sliver of hope that peo­ple can be kept talk­ing, then the Amer­i­cans, the Iraqis and any­one else involved should move heaven and earth to keep the lips mov­ing and sound com­ing out. The alter­na­tive is a civil war that might make Lebanon’s look tame.

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