Catch-22 on Iraqi constitutional draft and appeasing the Sunnis; should U.S. stay or should it go?
■"U.N. Is Critical Of Rule Change For Iraqi Ballot: Vote on the Constitution; Shiites and Kurds Urged to Undo Provision That Is Angering Sunnis," by Robert F. Worth and Kirk Semple, New York Times, 5 October 2005, p. A1.■"As Bush Pledges to Stay in Iraq, Military Talks Up Smaller Force: Some Top Brass Say Troops May Be Fueling Insurgency; Two Political Tests Ahead," by Greg Jaffe and Yochi J.Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, 5 October 2005, p. A1.
■"Iraqis Reverse Disputed Rules on Referendum: Vote on Constitution; Parliament Acts After U.N. Warning on Legitimacy of Oct. 15 Balloting," by Robert F. Worth and Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 6 October 2005, p. A1.
The UN group brought to oversee and validate the upcoming (15 Oct) national referendum on the constitution says the new rules recently pushed into operation by a coalition of Kurds and Shiites makes it almost impossible for the vote not to approve the draft constitution.
In effect the vote is rigged. The Kurds and the Shiites have made their deal with one another and made their best-faith offer to the Sunnis, but this is a take-it-or-leave-it offer because neither the Kurds nor the Shiites are willing to sit through more Sunni-driven insurgency. Simply put, they want to move on--and now. The fear is, if you make this vote too open, you risk the Sunnis garnering enough votes to hold up the political advance of the entire country, and the Kurds and the Shiites would prefer to piss off the Sunnis rather than have their future worth creating held in limbo.
I understand completely. It's a real catch-22, much like the one the U.S. military faces: the logic says plus-up the troops for the near-term to help the government skim past the likely high levels of insurgency-fueled violence in coming months, and then draw down as the Kurdish-Shiite dominated government basically takes up more and more of the internal security load, leaving U.S. troops more behind walls and/or focusing on closing off border access to foreign fighters.
The counter-logic to this says that the sheer presence of so many Western/American troops is--in and of itself--a big part of the insurgency problem.
This dilemma reflects our partial success in Iraq: we've succeeded wonderfully in building up the Kurdish mini-state (a process that stretched back many years under Saddam thanks to our no-fly-zone in the north), and we've done okay (with a great assist from British peacekeepers) in setting up a wonderfully responsible Shiite mini-state in the south (their unwillingness to go after Sunnis despite all their attacks is amazing, but it will necessarily end soon enough), but we've missed the boat in the Sunni Triangle. We low-balled our presence up front, then had to ramp it up big-time when the insurgency grew, and now we'd like to draw it back down and go Fourth Generation Warfare-style on the insurgency, but the transition to the post-referendum stability that we hope and believe will take root in the Shiite and Kurdish provinces strikes many U.S. commanders as a serious transition phase where troop levels should remain high.
Bottom line: the next few months will matter a whole lot, perhaps as much as the missed opportunity of the first few months after the invasion.
BTW, this article, written by Jaffe and Dreazen, is a great summary of the debate on troop levels throughout the entire Iraq build-up/war/occupation process. Worth reading and/or clipping.
What this whole debate represents more than anything is that the SysAdmin job is less about absolute amounts of resources expended than it is about the sequencing of the effort. Get the sequencing down right, and the resources required can be quite reasonable. Screw it up, and you'll be haunted from day one by resource "woulda's" and "coulda's" and "shoulda's."
In the end, the Kurds and the Shiites cave in to pressure from the U.N. (there's a rarity!), and this is good. It shows that both want the legitimacy of doing their referendum as much or more as they fear its possible rejection. Tell me that doesn't prove something about the success of our nation-building in both mini-states.