October 26, 2005

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.

To no one’s surprise, on the day that U.S. deaths in Iraq passed the symbolic 2,000 mark, the U.S.-installed Iraqi government announced, fully 10 days after the October 15 referendum, that voters in Iraq had backed the ersatz constitution. And so now the fuse is lit. Though the vote is being lavishly praised by the spokesmen for the Bush administration, it is in fact the prelude to the final unraveling of Iraq.

No one but the most credulous can believe that the vote tally in Iraq is an accurate one. Province after province racked up Saddam Hussein-like totals, with 95 percent or more of voters in 12 provinces—those heavily populated by Kurds and Shiite Arabs—voting "Yes." In Anbar province, in western Iraq, 97 percent of voters cast "No" ballots, the election commission in Iraq said, and in Salahuddin province, nearly 82 percent voted "No."

The election turned on the mixed provinces of Nineveh and Diyala, where 55 and 48 percent, respectively, also voted "No." Since the referendum would have rejected the constitution had any three provinces voted "No" by a two-thirds majority, the mostly Sunni opponents of the constitution thus failed—at least, if the election commission is to be believed. Naturally, opponents are charging that the vote was rigged—with some merit. Even the Iraqi Islamic Party, a branch of the International Muslim Brotherhood, is claiming that the election in Nineveh was stolen, presumably by mostly Kurdish militiamen who control parts of that mostly Sunni district. (Of course, the idea of calmly looking into allegations of vote fraud in a province where it is unsafe for most people to venture out of their homes is absurd on its face.)

Consider the steps that got Iraq to its current impasse.

The constitution itself was supposed to have been ready by August 1—but it wasn’t. Persistent and illegal delays—not vetted by Iraq’s parliament—dragged out the debate over the document’s most controversial provisions far past the legal deadline. And parliament never got to make a proper vote authorizing the final draft.

There in fact was never a final draft at all. Not only did Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad scramble to provide drafts of entire articles of the constitution in the days and weeks after the August deadline, according to intelligence sources, but the various Iraqi factions squabbled over them until deep into October, up to the very eve of the vote. In fact, virtually no one in Iraq had any idea of what they were actually voting on.

Printed copies of the constitution did not reach Iraqi voters at all, in most cases. Despite assertions by the White House spokesman that "tens of millions" of copies of the constitution were printed and distributed—in a nation with only 15 million total voters!—in fact, hardly any reached voters, especially in disputed or violence-racked areas.

And the civil war and U.S. offensive military operations raged before and during the vote, and then during the drawn-out counting of votes, creating conditions that under no circumstances can be viewed as conducive to anything resembling a democratic process.

The lit fuse is the result of the two factors: First, the constitution’s inherently divisive provisions—an extreme version of federalism, the apportioning of all of Iraq’s revenues from newly found oil to provinces that are likely to be controlled by Shiites and Kurds, the institutionalization of Sharia-style Islamic law, and a provision that guarantees an ever-expanding Kurdistan, among others—will lead to intensified Sunni Arab anger. That anger will be made even greater by the fact that Sunni voters so overwhelmingly opposed the constitution, and yet it passed anyway.

And second, promises that were made by Khalilzad and by the Shiite-Kurdish alliance that the constitution might be amended by the Iraqi government that takes over after scheduled December 15 elections are fool’s gold. The absolute dominance of the Shiite-Kurdish majority will simply combine to vote down any and all efforts to amend the document on behalf of Sunni Arab interests. So, expect anger at the unfairness of the constitutional process to lead to an intensified insurgency, more violence and eventually something that looks a lot like a full-scale civil war.

The potential for violence is made worse by the fact that those Sunnis who did, in fact, support the constitution—such as the Iraqi Islamic Party—now stand discredited. Far more credibility has been retained by the militant Sunni opponents of the constitution. In fact, after its decision to support the draft, the offices of the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) in Baghdad and several other cities were bombed, and some IIP branches openly broke with the decision by the party’s Baghdad leadership. And so the IIP’s decision to support the constitution may have been its final undoing. Meanwhile, the resistance goes on unchecked.

The Bush administration can applaud the approval of the constitution all it wants. But the constitution represents a "landmark day" in Iraq not because it is a step toward democracy, but because it is a step toward civil war.