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Call
us hopeless optimists, but we think there's still a
good chance Iraq's politicians will produce a draft
constitution to submit to the voters by Monday's
deadline.
Even if they fail, it's not the end of the world.
Another week is probably available before the
scheduled October vote on approval would have to be
postponed. A breakdown would mean new elections will
be held and the resulting National Assembly will try
again.
cw-2But there are at least two reasons for optimism:
First, nobody walked away from the table when the
first deadline passed last Monday, and second, the
Sunni participants are most probably not dreamers.
They can surely see the consequences of the
worst-case scenario, a three-way split of the
country among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and the
departure of American troops from all three areas.
There is reason to believe the Sunnis will accept at
the last minute the best offers they can get.
The United States is working as hard as it can to
avoid a split along religious and ethnic lines. That
would surely lead to yet another round of cleansing
in a nation that has already seen far too much of
that under Saddam. An independent Kurdistan in what
is northern Iraq would be seen by Turkey, a NATO
ally, as a magnet for its own Kurdish population
and, therefore, a threat to Turkey's territorial
integrity. A Shiite state in southern Iraq would be
far more vulnerable to malign Iranian influence than
the area is now, even if the Iraqi Shiites wanted to
stay independent.
But those two states would control substantial oil
production and revenue. An independent Sunni state
would have no such revenues to speak of, and would
be hard-pressed to defend itself from its neighbors,
or from a new Taliban-type regime dominated by the
underground jihadists who plague the area now.
The division of oil revenue has been a major
stumbling block to a draft constitution, though not
the only one by any means. An oil agreement
allotting at least some of the revenue benefits to
Sunni areas could open the way to others on the role
of Islam, women's rights and much else. If we had to
bet, we'd bet that the Iraqis will come up with one.
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