BAGHDAD–Hello all. We haven’t spo­ken in a while. I wish I could give you a good rea­son for that, but I can’t. After Marla’s death, I just didn’t feel like blog­ging for a while. It’s not like there’s been a dearth of mate­r­ial, how­ever. A new gov­ern­ment, a hell of a lot of vio­lence, alle­ga­tions of prior cor­rup­tion, mas­sive mil­i­tary oper­a­tions… And that’s just in the last month or so. Iraq’s a busy place.

But this week, the new Iraqi gov­ern­ment estab­lished the Con­sti­tu­tional Com­mit­tee that will draft Iraq’s per­ma­nent con­sti­tu­tion. It’s made up of 55 mem­bers of par­lia­ment that didn’t get tapped for Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s cabinet–which took way too long to get off the ground. Three months? I mean, c’mon. The gov­ern­ment expires, in the­ory, at the end of this year any­way. These guys’ main job is sup­posed to be mak­ing sure all the checks get signed and the writ­ing of a con­sti­tu­tion. And yet, they’re act­ing like a per­ma­nent gov­ern­ment, argu­ing over cab­i­net posts and putting more thought into their own polit­i­cal futures than the country’s. This pisses Iraqis off.

And speak­ing of polit­i­cal futures, Iyad Allawi is con­sid­er­ing tak­ing the chair­man­ship of the com­mit­tee, although one of his aides told me that he’s really prepar­ing for the next elec­tion. I told the aide that I thought being chair­man of the com­mit­tee might be a nice plat­form from which to run. True, admit­ted the aide, but if the process falls apart, Allawi will be blamed for that if he’s the chair­man. I coun­tered that if the process falls apart, Allawi’s going to have a lot more to worry about than his polit­i­cal viability–and so will Iraq.

Another name being bandied about is Houman al-Hammoudi, a polit­i­cal advi­sor to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of Supreme Coun­cil for Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq (SCIRI). These two guys are handy sym­bols for where Iraq may be head­ing. If Allawi takes the chair­man­ship, the new con­sti­tu­tion will likely have more Amer­i­can input and be more sec­u­lar. If al-Hamoudi gets it, look for a stronger role for Islam and more influ­ence from Tehran. (SCIRI still has sig­nif­i­cant ties to the Iran­ian regime.)

The chair­man will be announced today, inshal­lah, so we’ll get to see where we’re going. [UPDATE 5÷16÷05 5:32:23 PM: The chair­man­ship wasn’t announced on Sun­day because com­mit­tee mem­bers can’t decide between al-Hammoudi and a Kur­dish mem­ber.] But, in my opin­ion, it’s already off to a bad start. There are only two Sun­nis on the com­mit­tee. One sug­ges­tion to increase their rep­re­sen­ta­tion is to shunt them off to a sub­com­mit­tee ghetto, where they’ll fil­ter up their rec­om­men­da­tions to the main com­mit­tee. Dr. Saleh Mut­lak, a mem­ber of the National Dia­logue Coun­cil, the hot, new polit­i­cal group for dis­en­fran­chised Sun­nis, thinks things might be OK if Allawi is the chair­man but if it’s al-Hammoudi, the mar­gin­al­iz­ing of the reli­gious minor­ity will be com­plete. This is a recipe for yet more dis­as­ter, con­sid­er­ing the Sun­nis are already sus­pi­cious that de-Ba’athification is really code for an anti-Sunni purge.

The new gov­ern­ment and the Amer­i­cans might be wise to lis­ten to Mut­lak and his com­pa­tri­ots on the Coun­cil. They have good ties to the Iraqi insurgency–the Ba’athists and nation­al­ists, not the jihadis–and they’re look­ing for a deal. As TIME Mag­a­zine reported in Feb­ru­ary, mem­bers of the Ba’athist/nationalist insur­gency are open to nego­ti­at­ing an end to their strug­gle with the U.S. “We are ready,” said a top insur­gent nego­tia­tor, “to work with you.” The Coun­cil is their Sinn Fein.

But talks may have bro­ken down. Mut­lak declined to con­firm any nego­ti­a­tions, but handed me a state­ment yes­ter­day that reads, in part:

What we can­not for­get is the respon­si­bil­ity for the con­tin­u­a­tion of casu­al­ties that is borne by a blind insis­tence on a mil­i­tary solu­tion to the insur­gency. That mil­i­tary solu­tion, over the course of now two long years, has proven to be clearly unreachable.

The U.S. and its Coali­tion part­ners, which cre­ated the con­di­tions that pre­vail in Iraq today by its ill-advised dis­so­lu­tion of the Army and its sweep­ing de-Ba’athification edicts, should drop its “hands-off“attitude toward nego­ti­a­tions and polit­i­cal solu­tions and join with all of us, those in the Iraqi gov­ern­ment and those who are out­side, in the com­mon work of find­ing a polit­i­cal solu­tion that will end the insur­gency, and bring about the new demo­c­ra­tic Iraq that we all desire.

This tells me the talks may have bro­ken down and that they’re look­ing to start them up again. Prob­a­bly because the Sun­nis are wor­ried about Shi’ite revenge squads. One could argue whether they have it com­ing or not, but that is, in effect, argu­ing for civil war. So I guess the choices are let the Shi’ites and the Kurds mas­sacre the Sun­nis or talk with the for­mer Ba’athists and bring them into the gov­ern­ment. Your pick.

And this ties in with my cur­rent obses­sion: how Iraq will rec­on­cile itself with its recent bloody past and the role of the Ba’ath Party. While many Sunni lead­ers stayed and took part in the regime, the cur­rent Shi’ite and Kur­dish lead­er­ship spent much of the Sad­dam years in exile–and they have long mem­o­ries of the oppres­sion of their peo­ple by a mil­i­tary largely com­manded by Sunni offi­cers. So it’s no sur­prise that many for­mer mem­bers of Saddam’s mil­i­tary think this is not only a polit­i­cal purge, but also a sec­tar­ian one. “They do not mean Ba’athists,” said Abu Laith (a pseu­do­nym), a cap­tain from Fal­lu­jah in Iraq’s new 8^th Mech­a­nized Divi­sion. “They mean Sunnis.“

Abu Laith is a for­mer cap­tain in Iraq’s 6^th Armored Divi­sion, which was based in Basra. He chose not to fight the Amer­i­cans in March 2003, when they rolled north out of Kuwait. But now he’s ready to take up arms against the new gov­ern­ment and the Amer­i­cans if talks break down and hard­lin­ers in the Jaa­fari gov­ern­ment push for a purge of the secu­rity forces. “We are pro­fes­sional men and we know how to fight,” he said.

Los­ing expe­ri­enced offi­cers like Abu Laith to the insur­gency is not some­thing the Amer­i­cans want to see, which is why they seem to be more open to talks than the Iraqi gov­ern­ment. The Jaa­fari cab­i­net and the Kurds are not in a for­giv­ing mood for a lot of rea­sons. But the choices are going to come to down to talk­ing or fight­ing. Dri­ving the for­mer Ba’athists away from talks and their jobs is invit­ing catastrophe.

“If the gov­ern­ment has 1,000 ene­mies now, they will have 10,000 ene­mies,” said Abu Laith. “We are fight­ing for our lives.”