Five days before Saturday's referendum on Iraq's proposed constitution, the U.S. foreign policy elite appears both anxious and gloomy, increasingly worried that win or lose, the process will bring Iraq one step closer to civil war and, with it, the possible destabilisation of the wider region. The constitution's approval, in the view of many experts, will likely further alienate the Sunni population from the political process. . .
. . . "A defeat of the constitution [by Sunnis] could deepen Sunni-Shiite-Kurd divisions, and many observers fear that the odds of Shiite retaliation would increase," wrote Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor who advised the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week. "The fact that Shiites have not retaliated systematically (against Sunni attacks) is the only thing now standing between Iraq and a major civil war," he warned.
Some experts believe that a civil war is already underway, even if it is not yet a full-blown conflict. . . If accounts from the ground are to be believed, there is already some ethnic cleansing going on in some neighbourhoods and some areas within Iraq. The reason, according to top U.S. military officers in Iraq, is clear enough. "We've looked for the constitution to be a national pact, and the perception now is that it's not," Gen. George Casey, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, told lawmakers here last week. Indeed, the most important parts of the draft charter -- or at least those to which the Sunnis are most strongly opposed -- were worked out between the Kurds and the major Shiite parties despite U.S. efforts [to the contrary]. . .
The Sunnis' main concerns include provisions that could be used to discriminate against ex-Baathist Party members, ambiguous language about how the country's oil wealth will be divided between the national and local governments, and, most important, the constitutional mandate that permits the establishment of a nine-province, highly autonomous region for the predominantly Shiite south, as well as a less controversial, three-province Kurdish region in the north. Sunnis object to this confederal structure because it would both severely weaken the central government, which Sunnis had dominated since the Ottoman Empire, and possibly exclude the predominantly Sunni western provinces from getting a proportional share of Iraq's oil wealth, which is produced only in the northern and southern parts of the country. In addition, Sunnis express concerns that an autonomous Shiite south will be dominated by neighbouring Iran, which is believed to provide material and other support to the Shiite parties there. Even some supporters of the U.S. invasion have complained about the result. . . that approval of the constitution could provoke civil war. . .
*****************************
The United States has 'Lebanonised' Iraq. It is ironic that a structure that worked so poorly for Lebanon is now the template for Iraq.
BLOG ON
No comments:
Post a Comment