On May 16, a frantic U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to Baghdad and insisted that Sunni Arabs be included in the constitution-drafting committee. The Bush administration was terrified that if the Sunnis felt excluded from the drafting process or deeply disliked the resulting document, they might torpedo the new constitution in the national referendum scheduled for Oct. 15. She told the new government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari that despite its "de-Baathification" process, the Jaafari government must ''respect the fact that there now needs to be an inclusive Iraqi process and an inclusive Iraqi government.'' Behind the scenes, the United States pressed relentlessly for Sunni Arab inclusion.

The dominance of the drafting process by the religious Shiites was underlined on May 24 when Sheik Humam Hammoudi, a cleric, was appointed chairman of the committee. He is a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite religious party that admires the Iranian model of governance. With his white turban, austere face, graying beard and brown robes, he is a ringer for the mullahs who run Iran, against whom Iraqis fought a bitter eight-year war. Nevertheless, SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim voiced his support for greater Sunni Arab participation in the drafting of the document. A week later, with the issue still unresolved, the committee began its work.

In early June, the Jaafari government launched Operation Lightning, a concerted sweep of Sunni Arab neighborhoods in Baghdad, aimed at increasing security in the bomb-scarred capital. The three major Sunni Arab political groupings strenuously denounced the random searches of homes and the arrest of hundreds, often on slim evidence. Despite the tensions generated by the operation, the negotiations continued. The Shiites at length offered to add 13 Sunni Arab members to the committee, bringing the total to 15. They were not prepared to give these 13 voting rights, since they were not members of Parliament, but promised that all decisions would be made by consensus. (It was an empty promise, as the Sunni Arabs had suspected all along.) The Sunnis, who still had not gotten the message that they weren't actually wanted, threatened to boycott the deliberations unless they were given at least 25 seats on the drafting committee. In the end, the Sunnis were finessed. On June 16, they were given 15 new seats, bringing their total to 17, but another 10 "counselors" were recognized who were no more than observers. The Shiites warned them that if they did not accept this deal, the constitution would just be written without them.

Choosing the Sunni Arab members of the committee was in turn no easy task. The Sunni Arabs had no umbrella organization, their leadership having been fragmented by the collapse of the Baath Party. Adnan Dulaimi, a religious hardliner who headed the Sunni Board of Pious Endowments, submitted his own list of 25, without consulting anyone else. (His organization oversees the country's Sunni mosques and other religious properties. He was later summarily fired by the Shiite prime minister.) Other Sunnis formed a new organization, the National Dialogue Council, to represent their interests and put forward nominees. The disdain in which the Sunni Arab leadership continued to be held, and the suspicions that attached to it of supporting the guerrilla war and terrorist actions, were underlined when U.S. troops arrested and briefly held Muhsin Abdul Hamid, a former president of the interim governing council and venerable head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had generally cooperated with the United States.

It was now mid-June, and the deadline for finishing the draft of the permanent constitution and having it adopted by Parliament was Aug. 15. Salih Mutlak, of the National Dialogue Council, told the New York Times on June 15 that the deadline would have to be extended, saying, ''I don't want to put my name on a constitution that will be written in two weeks."

The path to nominating the 15 new full members of the drafting committee was strewn with land mines. First there was a controversy over whether the list of 15, which a small group of political leaders had come up with, should be approved by a big Sunni Arab political congress. That suggestion was shot down by the Sunni elders, who complained that it would just complicate things and delay the process. Grass-roots democracy has not been a strong suit in Sunni Iraqi political culture in the past few decades. Then a further controversy erupted when it was alleged that two of the 15 had been members of the Baath Party. One of the two denied the charge; the other admitted it but said he had not been high ranking and anyway had never committed any crimes. Others were less apologetic. Mutlak opined to the New York Times on July 1, ''I still see the Baath Party as the best party we have seen. If you compare them, they are much better than the parties that are governing the country now.'' The new group of 15 Sunni Arabs was finally added to the committee officially on July 6, though Shiite parliamentarians hinted darkly that some of them were still under investigation for possible past Baath Party activities.

The deadline for finishing the permanent constitution was now only five weeks away. It is not clear that most local garden societies could draft by-laws in five weeks, much less a country the size of California with a similar population. Then disaster struck. Or rather, yet another, worse, disaster struck. On July 19, guerrillas killed two members of the 15-member Sunni Arab team. The remaining members could see the writing on the wall if they did not get better protection, since many in the Sunni guerrilla movement saw them as Benedict Arnolds working for the colonial power while pretending to be loyal patriots. They were all strolling around the capital with big red targets painted on them. They angrily staged a walkout and refused to go back to work without bodyguards. Adnan al-Janabi, a parliamentarian and member of the drafting committee, grandiosely announced that he held the Iraqi government and Parliament and the United Nations responsible. "Despite these parties' announcement they would back the process of writing the constitution, they did not provide security for Sunni members," al-Janabi told the wire services.

Mutlak and three other members of the committee from the National Dialogue Council demanded an international investigation. Mutlak told the Boston Globe, "We cannot be part of this." Shiite parliamentarian Saad Jawad Qandil (SCIRI), also a member of the drafting committee, pointed out that the Shiite parties could always just pass a constitution, but preferred to have Sunni support in hopes of reducing future strife. The Shiite refrain to the Sunni Arabs anytime the latter became obstreperous was always that the Shiites did not need them but wouldn't mind if they wanted to come along.

It was not until July 25 that the Sunni Arab members agreed to drop their boycott, in return for the Jaafari government (and presumably the United States) undertaking to provide them with security and to establish a commission with Sunni Arab membership to investigate the killings. Another week had been lost, and now only three weeks remained until the deadline.

On July 31, Sunni Arab parliamentarian Mishaan al-Juburi gave an interview with the London Arabic-language daily, al-Hayat, in which he warned of civil war if the three major Sunni Arab reservations about the constitution are ignored. The Shiites and Kurds on the drafting committee had made up a list of Iraqi minorities, and the Shiites wished to include Iranian-Iraqis, those of Persian ancestry, among the minorities. There certainly is an Iranian-Iraqi minority, which suffered persecution and deportation under Saddam. But Sunni Arabs fear that bestowing formal recognition on it will prove a back door whereby Iranians could flood into the country and gain citizenship. Al-Juburi said that Sunni Arabs also reject turning Iraq into a loose federal union, and reject the injection of Shiite religion into the constitution.

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