The drafting committee members by this time faced a momentous choice. The interim constitution drafted under American rule allowed them to notify Parliament on Aug. 1 that they would be unable to produce a final document by Aug. 15. In that case, they would be granted a six-month delay. The Sunni Arabs wanted such a delay. The Shiites and Kurds and their American patrons, in contrast, were deathly afraid that any such postponement would halt their political momentum and give encouragement to the largely Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. The guerrillas were launching more attacks every day in summer of 2005 than they had the previous summer, and they had more influence in the Sunni Arab heartland than they had had a year before. The Bush administration was convinced that only completing the constitution and holding new elections in which, this time, the Sunnis took part, would set Iraq on the path to stability and allow a drawdown of US troops. In fact, it would have been better for the constitution-writing process to take the extra six months, since attempting to draft a constitution in less than two months is clearly absurd, as the Sunni Arabs charged.

On Friday, Aug. 12, Sunni clerics preached in their mosques against the call of SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim for a Shiite confederation of nine provinces in the south, which would retain much of the region's oil wealth rather than sharing all of it with the rest of the country. Clergymen in Baghdad, Tikrit, and other Sunni areas urged Sunni Arabs to register to vote in the Oct. 15 referendum, so as to vote down the constitution if it recognized this form of federalism. Mutlak revealed that the Americans were urging Sunni Arabs to accept vague language about federalism for now, and to postpone specifics until a permanent Parliament was elected in December. Mutlak told the Associated Press, "We reject that."

Despite enormous American pressure, the committee failed to complete its work by the deadline of Aug. 15. The issue was not really drafting a constitution. It gradually became clear that the Shiites, the Kurds, even the Americans, had all developed drafts some time before. The difficulty was in reconciling these various proposed texts. The Shiites and the Kurds had many disagreements, but were generally willing to compromise with each other in the end. Even they had not reached complete agreement by Aug. 15. But the Sunni Arabs, with their stubborn rejection of federalism, proved a third wheel, impossible to placate given the aspirations of the other groups. By Sunday, Aug. 14, Shiites leaked a threat to the New York Times that they would just go ahead and pass a constitution without the Sunnis if the latter continued to be so uncooperative. The bluff did not work, and Parliament was constrained to amend the Transitional Administrative Law to allow a delay of a week, until Aug. 22, for passage of the constitution.

The profound political divisions among the Sunni Arabs were illuminated gruesomely once again on Aug. 18, when party workers from the Iraqi Islamic Party in Mosul were killed by guerrillas for urging Sunnis to register to vote. The IIP was registering them so that they could defeat the constitution in the Oct. 15 referendum, but even this degree of cooperation with the American-installed order was unacceptable to the rejectionist guerrilla movement. Increasingly, the politics that gripped the Sunni Arabs did not have to do with shaping the constitution. Rather, they were divided on how exactly to defeat it, whether by force of arms alone or by ensuring a three-province veto in the referendum. On Aug. 20, al-Qaida in Mesopotamia threatened to kill anyone with any link at all to the constitution (that is, even if the person just registered to vote so as to reject it). Since the requirement is that two-thirds of those who vote in the referendum reject the constitution in three provinces, however, the strategy of voting it down could succeed even with a light Sunni Arab turnout. Salih Mutlak, one of those under the death sentence, told the London Times that he thought the Aug. 22 deadline would be met, but "criticized the Americans and British for rushing the process."

In fact, the parliamentary drafting committee appears no longer to have been meeting by that weekend. Rather, the negotiations were among major political and community leaders. Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, doubled as the representative of Kurdish interests. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who led the dominant party in Parliament, doubled as a representative of the interests of the religious Shiites. For the most part, the Sunni Arabs were not even invited to the meetings. The Shiites made a final push to have Islamic law recognized in the constitution, and this time the Americans relented. Loose federalism was a quid pro quo for the Kurds. Two of Mishaan al-Juburi's three deal-breakers were now in the text.

The Aug. 22 deadline was not met, either, though an almost-finished draft was presented to Parliament moments before midnight, for all the world like Cinderella hurrying disheveled from the ball. To the extent there was an agreement on it, it was the agreement of Kurds with Shiites. This time, the Shiite prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and other high officials did not even bother to amend the interim constitution again. They simply announced a three-day delay, during which they would attempt to get the agreement of all three major groups to the almost-finished draft. This move was clearly unconstitutional, it and signaled the impatience of the new political elite of Shiites and Kurds with Sunni Arab foot dragging (as they see it). Parliament did not even meet on the third day, and no later session was scheduled, throwing the process again into limbo.

The Sunni Arabs in the street were furious that their representatives had been virtually sidelined. Sunni Arab politicians speaking to the Arabic press warned that they would launch an intifada against the new constitution and said that the streets would be in flames. (They should have looked out the window; they might have found that the guerrillas had made such threats redundant.) We have already seen Bush's ominous response to the Sunnis: The Arab press correctly interpreted his bluster as a threat of more American Fallujah campaigns against the Sunni Arabs. But the Sunnis were not impressed. Even in Fallujah, which the Americans had bombed into submission, Sunni Arab families flocked to the voter registration sites to sign up to vote on Oct. 15, with the intention of defeating the constitution.

On Aug. 25, even as Parliament failed to meet its new deadline, the Sunni Arab members of the drafting committee had not altogether given in to despair. Mutlak suggested that compromise was still possible. After all, the Shiites had originally insisted that Islam be recognized as "the" source of Iraqi law, but had finally agreed, in the face of Kurdish opposition, that it would be "a fundamental" source. The Kurds had originally demanded an explicit right to secession, but ultimately gave up on its inclusion in the text. If religious Shiites and Kurds could find compromise language, President Talabani insisted, there was no reason in principle that the Sunni Arabs could not, as well.

The problem, however, is that the Kurds and Shiites could compromise in part because they both saw the benefits of regional confederations with claims on local resources, given that both have petroleum. The Sunni Arabs fear that such a system will leave them only with "the drifting sands of Anbar province." A system like Alaska's, in which oil profits are shared as royalties with all citizens equally, might have sidestepped some of the disputes over the prerogatives of provincial confederations, but the American Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq for a year did not institute that system when it had the chance. The Americans were still dreaming then of privatizing everything in Iraq for the sake of U.S. corporate profits (including the air Iraqis breathed, if possible.) Moreover, the long string of Bush administration mistakes in Iraq, along with the rejectionism of many in the Sunni leadership strata, had so alienated most Sunni Arabs that their negotiators -- unlike the populist Kurdish and Shiite leaders -- lacked much of a base of popular support, fatally weakening the Sunni bargaining position.

Parliament can clearly ram the draft constitution through at will, since the Shiites and the Kurds dominate it. In fact, the Kurdistan regional Parliament approved the federal constitution on Aug. 24, even before the federal Parliament had. But the real question now is whether the constitution can survive the referendum. The Sunni Arabs dominate Anbar and Salah al-Din provinces, and almost certainly can muster a two-thirds "no" vote on Oct. 15 in both. They may also be able to pull off a rejection in Ninevah province. In that case, Parliament would dissolve, new elections for Parliament would be held in December, and the entire process would begin all over again -- a nightmarish prospect. Meanwhile, the Sunni Arab guerrillas continue their macabre war against a new order that cannot seem to get its act together.

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