BAGHDAD–With six weeks to go (more or less) until the Aug. 15 dead­line for turn­ing in their Con­sti­tu­tion home­work, Shi’ites and Sun­nis have finally agreed that there will be some Sun­nis on the Con­sti­tu­tional Com­mit­tee beaver­ing away on the draft of the country’s charter.

There will be 15 Sun­nis on the com­mit­tee, picked mainly by tribal sheikhs and other respected men, and another 10 Sunni “advi­sors” to the com­mit­tee, account­ing for almost 36 per­cent of the 70-person com­mit­tee. (There are sev­eral sub­com­mit­tees work­ing away on spe­cific sec­tions of the draft, but I don’t have any data on those bodies.)

This is a sig­nif­i­cant step, and don’t let naysay­ers tell you oth­er­wise. Most sig­nif­i­cant, per­haps, is the will­ing­ness of a hard­line Shi’ite cleric, Humam al-Hammoudi of the Supreme Coun­cil for Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq, to tamp down anti-Ba’athist sen­ti­ment among the Shi’ites and Kurds on the com­mit­tee and, in essence, let bygones be bygones. At least as far as the makeup of the com­mit­tee goes.

“If we were talk­ing about min­istries, names might be more impor­tant,” he said, as quoted by the New York Times. “But since it’s a com­mit­tee, hav­ing the views is more impor­tant than the names.“

I’ve talked with oth­ers, close to Iraqi Prime Min­is­ter Ibrahim Jaa­fari and other Shi’ite movers and shak­ers, and they’re of the same mind. Some of these men are optimistic–such as the advi­sor to the prime min­is­ter I spoke with–while oth­ers are not. One influ­en­tial Shi’a leader, who never fled Iraq dur­ing the Sad­dam years doesn’t think the con­sti­tu­tion will be done on time. The other Shi’a leader, who did, is con­cerned that the dead­line will be met, but the out­come will be less than desirable–at least for sec­u­lar Iraqis.

(I’m not men­tion­ing names because that was the deal I made with them. I hope you’ll trust me enough that these men are play­ers, they know what they’re talk­ing about and that they’re close to the action.)

There are a num­ber of obsta­cles to mak­ing the Aug. 15 dead­line, how­ever. They are:

1. The role of Islam in legislation;
2. The sta­tus of Kirkuk;
3. How much auton­omy will be given to the provinces.

These were all pre­dicted long ago, and noth­ing new has devel­oped the change the issues con­fronting Iraq. The reli­gious Shi’ites in charge of the government–Prime Min­is­ter Ibrahim Jaa­fari, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and others–are close to Iran and want a more Islamist gov­ern­ment, maybe not as severe as Tehran’s wilayat al-faqih, but cer­tainly more Islamic than Iraqis are used to. They want Islam to be the source of leg­is­la­tion instead of a source of legislation.

The Kurds are, some­what pre­dictably, throw­ing a span­ner in the works by insist­ing that sta­tus of Kirkuk be set­tled before the con­sti­tu­tion is drafted, while the Shi’ites want to put off the idea until after the con­sti­tu­tion is approved. The trou­ble is, the Kurds won’t approve the con­sti­tu­tion in the sched­uled Oct. 15 ref­er­en­dum if Kirkuk is left up in the air. They don’t really trust Iraq’s Shi’ite and Sunni Arabs to deal with them fairly on this emo­tional issue, so they’re hold­ing out the threat of not approv­ing the con­sti­tu­tion as a cud­gel to get their way now. Which is what they always do, and it leads to some seri­ous brinkman­ship. I sus­pect the Amer­i­cans will step in at some point and assure the Kurds they have their back if they’ll just yield on this issue.

And as for auton­omy, oh boy. This is a hot issue, and there’s a new wrin­kle. Sec­u­lar Shi’ites in the south, led by a Baqr Yassin, have started a push toward mak­ing the south­ern three provinces of Basra, Amara and Nasariyah into an autonomous zone called “Sumer,” sim­i­lar to the arrange­ment the Kurds have now. He’s call­ing for local con­trol of resources–including the vast oil reserves there–and some kind of con­trol of mil­i­tary units in the region. Grand Aya­tol­lah Ali al-Sistani and the Jaa­fari crowd are opposed to such an idea, say­ing such a devel­op­ment would pose a threat to the unity of Iraq.

There are three other rea­son for their oppo­si­tion: Turkey, Syria and espe­cially Iran. A fed­eral Iraq, with strong provin­cial gov­ern­ments based on eth­nic or sec­tar­ian lines is seen as a threat in those three coun­tries who all have restive Kur­dish pop­u­la­tions that have been han­ker­ing for autonomous regions of their own in line with Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. Iran, espe­cially, would face a dif­fi­cult situation–well, dif­fi­cult for the mullahs–because it’s incred­i­bly diverse. Per­sians make up 51 per­cent, Azeri 24 per­cent, Gilaki and Mazan­darani 8 per­cent, Kurds 7 per­cent, Arabs 3 per­cent, Lur, Baluch and Turk­men 2 per­cent each and “other” make 1 per­cent. If “Sumer” became a real­ity along­side an autonomous Kurdistan–each with their own sources of petro-wealth–the Arab pop­u­la­tion of Khuzes­tan just across the Persian/Arabian Gulf would likely try to join them or form their own eth­nic enclave. You’re look­ing at a sce­nario of a Balka­nized Mid­dle East.

The ques­tion you have to ask is why are sec­u­lar Shi’ites push­ing for Sumer? And why is Baqr Yassin, a for­mer Ba’athist opposed to Sad­dam Hus­sein and allied with the Syr­ian branch of the party, the man to lead the move­ment? Because the sec­u­lar Shi’ites in the south are scared to death of Iran and its suf­fo­cat­ing brand of Islam. Already Basra, which I’m told used to be quite a party town, is pop­u­lated by black-sheathed women and no liquor stores, cin­e­mas or any­thing else sec­u­lar Iraqis enjoy. Mili­tias such as the Badr Organization–formerly com­manded by al-Hakim, now head of SCIRI–which fought along­side the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards in the Iran-Iraq War (1980−88) con­trol the cops. Free­lance vice and moral­ity squads roam the streets. And this is all at the urg­ing of Iran, which has deeply infil­trated its neigh­bor. The old Ba’athist Yassin is fight­ing the Iran-Iraq war all over again–as are many of the Ba’athist insur­gents who strike at Jaafari’s Shi’ite gov­ern­ment because, they say, “It’s Iran­ian.” And it’s why Adnan al-Dulaimi, the cus­to­dian of Iraq’s waqf and who claims to speak for sev­eral insur­gent groups, calls for Sunni par­tic­i­pa­tion in Iraqi pol­i­tics so they can com­bat shu’ubiyyah, a racist term favored by Ba’athists that basi­cally calls Iraqi Shi’ites “Persians“–although “dirty Per­sians” might be more accu­rate in its inter­pre­ta­tion. This has enraged my Shi’ite sources.

I can’t speak to the truth of such charges. I believe that Iran is deeply, deeply involved in a great deal of mis­chief from the head of the Gulf all the way up to Bagh­dad. But men who have to know what is going on because they can get killed if they don’t are wor­ried about the future, and what kind of coun­try Iraq will become.

In end, it may not mat­ter who’s on the com­mit­tee to write the con­sti­tu­tion if the three main groups can’t see past their self-interests–or their patrons’.