Splitting Up Iraq?

America's Founding Fathers spent nearly four months hashing out a constitution. Iraq's drafting committee has been trying to crank one out in half that time. With an Aug. 1 deadline rapidly approaching, the chief sticking point appears to be how the government can avoid another Saddam-like concentration of power. Both the Shi'ites and the Kurds are pushing for varying degrees of federalism, and the U.S. is supporting the plan. The Kurds have long sought a large degree of autonomy for their region in the north. The Shi'ites too are now calling for an autonomous region in the south, to be called Sumer, home to Iraq's only ports, as well as at least 80% of its oil reserves.

The stumbling block is the Sunni contingent, which opposes a partition along sectarian or ethnic lines and wants a strong central government. "The Sunni Arabs are already pushing back on this. They all hate it," said a U.S. embassy official familiar with the drafting process. Jawad al-Malaki, a Shi'ite committee member and adviser to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, calls the Sunni approach a nonstarter, warning that it could lead to a new dictatorship. Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to convince the Sunnis that federalism is in their interest. "If you had the kind of system the Sunnis want, what you'd probably get is a Shi'a Prime Minister appointing a Shi'a Islamist to go run Anbar [a mainly Sunni province where much of the insurgency is raging]," the official said. "Do you really think that's what they want?"

Unless the constitution committee asks for a six-month extension, these squabbling groups plan to submit a draft by month's end so that Parliament can vote on it by Aug. 15. Already some fear that the Sunnis may want to keep up their recalcitrance in order to force new elections. But Shi'ite and Kurdish members say they will vote the constitution out of the committee without the Sunnis if they must, and the U.S. is willing to back them up. If the Sunnis derail the process, says the U.S. official, "we'll know who to blame." --By Christopher Allbritton