[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 162 (Friday, December 16, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H12032-H12033]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         DISINTEGRATION OF IRAQ

  (Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute.)
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, in the glow after the election, I come to 
the floor really to caution this House with the words of an old 
colleague of mine who says it is always too soon to congratulate 
yourself.
  The New York Times on the 11th of December carried an editorial which 
is entitled Present at the Disintegration.
  What he says, and he is an Iraqi, is that the government that has 
been established by the constitution and has now been elected is 
fatally flawed in three ways, and what we are going to get is continued 
civil war in that country because it is not possible to resolve the 
problems, given the people who have been elected.
  The first is, we have created a parliament that can override the 
executive. We, secondly, created an executive that is divided between a 
president and a council of ministers, so there will be constant tension 
between the two factions that will control the government, the Shia and 
the Kurds. The Sunnis, everybody knows, are not going to be one of the 
controlling parties.
  Finally, it encourages local governments to break off and become 
sovereign. What we are watching is the disintegration of Iraq.

                [From the New York Times, Dec. 11, 2005]

                     Present at the Disintegration

                           (By Kanan Makiya)

       Washington and Baghdad will be tempted, with the adoption 
     of a new Constitution and the election on Thursday for a 
     four-year government, to declare victory in Iraq. In one 
     sense, they are right to do so. The emerging Iraqi polity 
     undoubtedly represents a radical break not only with the 
     country's past but also with the whole Arab state system 
     established by Britain and France after the collapse of the 
     Ottoman Empire.
       But in the larger sense, such optimism is misguided, for 
     none of the problems associated with Iraq's monumental change 
     have been sorted out. Worse, profound tensions and 
     contradictions have been enshrined in the Constitution of the 
     new Iraq, and they threaten the very existence of the state.
       How did we get here? Much has been said about American 
     failures in Iraq. And rightly so. But, as I've seen as a 
     participant in political discussions both before and after 
     the war, we Iraqis have also failed to lay the ground for a 
     new order. For the new political elite cast into power by the 
     elections last January has been unable even to begin to 
     create a stable and strong Iraqi state to replace the one 
     overthrown in April 2003. The increasing daily casualty rate 
     for Iraqis, from 26 in early 2004 to an average of 64 in this 
     fall, is only the most glaring sign that something has gone 
     terribly wrong, and not for lack of any American effort to 
     turn the situation around.
       Unfortunately, we cannot expect the situation to change 
     following Thursday's election. There is little chance that 
     the winner will command the authority inside Parliament to 
     reverse the decline, for a simple reason: the Constitution.
       All signs suggest that this Constitution, if it is not 
     radically amended, will further weaken the already failing 
     central Iraqi state. In spite of all the rhetoric in that 
     document about the unity of the ``homeland of the apostles 
     and prophets'' and the ``values and ideals of the heavenly 
     messages and findings of science'' that have played a role in 
     ``preserving for Iraq its free union,'' it is disunity, 
     diminished sovereignty and years of future discord that lie 
     in store for Iraq if the Constitution is not overhauled.
       Any government that emerges from the coming elections will 
     be fatally undermined in at least three ways.
       First, the Constitution establishes a supremely powerful 
     Parliament, which can ride roughshod over the executive. 
     While that Parliament, as it is designed in the Constitution, 
     looks like a democratic institution, it doesn't work like 
     one. Rather, it is an artificially constructed collection 
     of ethnic and sectarian voting blocs. If the experience of 
     the interim government is any guide, the few people who 
     control those blocs are the ones who will wield real 
     power, and they will do so largely through handpicked 
     committees and backroom wheeling and dealing. Because this 
     cabal of powerbrokers also chooses the president and the 
     prime minister and can dismiss them with a simple 
     majority, there will be no check on the tyranny of 
     majorities operating under the aegis of the legislature.
       Second, executive power is divided between the president 
     and the council of ministers, guaranteeing that major 
     decisions will be met with the same tension and paralysis 
     that have plagued the present government. Both the president 
     and the prime minister (it is assumed, though not explicitly 
     stated, that these two posts will be apportioned out to a 
     Kurd and a Shiite Arab, as they are at present) can 
     separately present bills to Parliament--a sure recipe for 
     conflict. And both the president and the prime minister can 
     be fired after a no-confidence motion endorsed by a 
     parliamentary majority. At a time of civil war and pervasive 
     violence, in other words, no one person or institution can be 
     said to be in charge of the executive branch of the federal 
     government.
       Third, the Constitution encourages the transformation of 
     governorates and local administrations into powerful, nearly 
     sovereign regions that, with the exception of Kurdistan, have 
     no underlying basis for unity. And while the articles dealing 
     with the functioning of the federal government are poorly 
     worded and intended to dissipate executive power, the 10 
     articles of Section 5, on the powers and manner of formation 
     of new regions, are a model of clarity and have been drafted 
     with the sole purpose of encouraging new regions to be 
     created at the expense of the federal union.
       This guarantees that the more Iraqi provinces opt for 
     regional status, and get it, the more the federal state will 
     shrivel up and die. Moreover, with the exception of those who 
     reside in provinces without oil (or in Baghdad, which cannot 
     join a region), it is in the interest of every populist 
     demagogue to press for regional status, because it is at that 
     level that the lawmaking that truly affects day-to-day life 
     will take place.
       The powers of the new regions will be enormous. Not even 
     the Iraqi Army can travel through one without the permission 
     of the regional Parliament. And should there be any doubt 
     about where the whip hand will lie on any issue not 
     explicitly addressed in the Constitution, Article 122 states: 
     ``Articles of the Constitution may not be amended if such 
     amendment takes away from the power of the regions . . . 
     except by the consent of the legislative authority of the 
     concerned region and the approval of the majority of its 
     citizens.''
       An Iraqi wit known only as Shalash al-Iraqi has lampooned 
     this devolution of power in an imaginary constitution, called 
     ``The Federalism of the city of Thawra and its Environs,'' 
     posted on the Internet. Its preamble reads:
       Congruent with the wave of federalisms that is sweeping 
     Iraq, the city of Thawra and its surrounding neighborhoods 
     have decided to constitute themselves as a federal region . . 
     . For this purpose a Constituent Assembly of the 
     representatives of the most important and influential tribes 
     in the City has been established . . . [and it] has noted 
     that the City of Thawra [is well suited to become a region 
     because it] floats on a lake of oil, and possesses a huge 
     labor force along with an independent army and police force . 
     . . In addition the city is bounded by a canal, which is its 
     water link to the cities of the adjoining sisterly Republic 
     of Iraq . . .
       ``We, people of the valley east of the canal, . . . have of 
     our own volition and free will decided to separate from the 
     people of Baghdad and all the other irritating governorates 
     like Ramadi, Diwaniya, Tikrit, Darbandikhan, Samawa and all 
     the rest . . . The adoption of this, our constitution, will 
     free us from all the headaches and problems of Iraq.''
       There is nothing wrong with having strong regions within a 
     federal union. Unfortunately the new Iraqi Constitution fails 
     to inject the glue that would hold such a union together: the 
     federal government. It sets up a regional system with big 
     short-term winners (Shiite Arabs and Kurds) and big short-
     term losers (Sunni Arabs). It even allocates extra oil and 
     gas revenues to the regions that generate them, on the 
     implicit assumption that because of the political inequities 
     of the past, the state owes the Sunnis of the resource-poor 
     western provinces less than it does the Shiites and Kurds. 
     But these provinces are not significantly better off than 
     other parts of Iraq.
       Iraq's Sunni Arabs voted solidly against the Constitution 
     not because they are Saddam Hussein loyalists, nor because 
     they hate the Kurds and Shiites (as some of the insurgents 
     do); they voted against it because by doing away with the 
     central state, which they had championed during the previous 
     80 years, and penalizing them for living in regions without 
     oil, the Constitution became a punitive document--one that 
     began to seem as if it was written to punish them for the 
     sins of the Baath.
       What is wrong with pursuing the Constitution to its logical 
     conclusion: the breakup of

[[Page H12033]]

     Iraq? Nothing, if that breakup is consensual and does not 
     entail an escalation in the violence tearing the country 
     apart. But such is not the case. The debate in Parliament 
     over the Constitution was extremely polarized and 
     artificially cut short by the majority. Moreover, if a mere 
     83,283 people in the province of Nineveh had voted no instead 
     of yes, the draft constitution would have been defeated.
       Sunni opposition to the new order will continue. Crushing 
     it by force, as some Shiite hotheads in the Parliament's 
     majority bloc are calling for, will be an extremely bloody 
     business. Even if the long-term outcome of an all-out Iraqi 
     civil war is not in doubt, the body count and destruction 
     would make Lebanon's war look like a picnic. No moral person 
     can condone the parliamentary majority that makes this 
     happen.
       The 2003 Iraq war has indeed brought about an irreversible 
     transformation of politics and society in Iraq. But this 
     transformation has not consolidated power, as the great 
     revolutions of the past have tended to do (in France, Russia 
     and even Iran), nor is it distributing power on an agreed 
     upon and equitable basis, as happened after the American 
     Revolution and as Iraqi liberal democrats like myself had 
     hoped would happen after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Rather, 
     it is dissipating it. And that is a terrifying prospect for a 
     population whose primary legacy from the Saddam Hussein era 
     is a profound mistrust of government in all its forms.
       By ceding and dismissing centralized power, Iraqis may end 
     by ceding all their power. Iran in the short run, and the 
     Arab world in the long run, will fill the vacuum with 
     proxies, turning the dream of a democratic and reborn Iraq 
     into a dystopia of warring militias and rampant hopelessness.
       The reaction against tyranny in Iraq was always going to 
     take the form of a new kind of state in the Middle East, one 
     that in the minds of those who struggled against the regime 
     of Saddam Hussein had to be profoundly decentralized. And 
     federalism did not have to entail the dissipation of power. 
     As it was first envisioned, a federal Iraq promised to 
     safeguard against despotism while furnishing a framework 
     both strong and flexible enough to reconcile the competing 
     demands of its citizens.
       Federalism first entered the lexicon of the Iraqi 
     opposition in 1992, when the newly created Kurdish Parliament 
     voted in favor of it as a way of governing the relation of 
     Kurdistan to the rest of the country. That vote was ratified 
     a few months later by a conference of the Iraqi opposition in 
     Salahuldin, in northern Iraq.
       Remarkably, the idea of federalism survived the bitter 
     infighting among Iraqi exiles in months before the 2003 war, 
     becoming one of the few common denominators in the discourse 
     of the opposition about the future of Iraq. The fact that 
     there was no literature in Arabic on federalism to speak of, 
     and that Iraqi parties and organizations did not know or 
     agree upon what federalism meant, and that Iraqi politicians 
     did not bother themselves with thinking about what it might 
     mean, did not deter individuals, parties and organizations 
     from continuing to advocate it.
       I was one of the idea's most ardent Arab advocates. In 
     Salahuldin, I delivered the keynote speech on the subject, 
     not only endorsing the Kurdish Parliament's decision, but 
     presenting federalism as a general solution to the problems 
     of the Iraqi state. A federalism based on Iraq's existing 18 
     governorates broke the rotten mold of Iraqi and Arab 
     politics, I argued. No Iraqi political organization could 
     afford not to be for it, especially not one that called 
     itself democratic. Without a system of government in which 
     real power devolved away from Baghdad, the autonomous, 
     predominantly Kurdish north must sooner or later opt for 
     separation. And how could any Iraqi expect otherwise, after 
     all the terrible things that had been done to the Kurds in 
     the name of Arabism?
       Some Arabs argued that one must concede federalism in the 
     interest of getting rid of Saddam Hussein and because the 
     Kurds are in a position to force it upon us. And we must 
     accept federalism, some Kurds said, not because we really 
     want it, but because the regional situation does not allow us 
     to secede. But utilitarian calculation did not lie behind the 
     democratic argument.
       Federalism in Iraq would both separate and divide powers. 
     Painstakingly negotiated arrangements would distinguish the 
     powers of the parts from those of the center, taking care to 
     leave important functions in the hands of the federal 
     government.
       We thought it wise to define regions territorially, 
     according to the relative distribution of the population, and 
     to include in the constitution the claim that the country's 
     resources (in particular oil revenues, the only real source 
     of income for the foreseeable future), would belong to all 
     Iraqis equally and would be managed by the federal 
     government. Different ethnicities and sects would almost 
     certainly form majorities in particular regions. The point 
     was not to change such distributions, but to emphasize the 
     equality of citizenship.
       Such a federalism, Iraqi democrats said, was the logical 
     extension of the principle of human rights. It was based on 
     the notion that the rights of the part--whether that part was 
     a single person or a group--should not be sacrificed to the 
     will of the majority. What people like myself failed to 
     appreciate, or understand, before 2003, were the powerful 
     forces driving toward purely ethnic and sectarian criteria 
     for the definition of the ``parts'' of the new federal idea. 
     The consequence of those forces has been a tremendous 
     weakening of the political idea of Iraq, which the new 
     Constitution has converted into hostility toward central 
     government per se.
       A decentralized, federal state system that devolves power 
     to the regions is not the same as a dysfunctional one in 
     which power at the federal level has been eviscerated. The 
     former preserves power while distributing it; the latter 
     destroys it. At the moment Iraqis have a dysfunctional and 
     powerless state. The Constitution does not fix this; it makes 
     it worse.
       What began as an American problem is today an Iraqi one. To 
     steer the country away from anarchy and manage the furies 
     that have been unleashed, the following measures need to be 
     undertaken by the new Iraqi Parliament the moment it 
     reconvenes after the elections:
       Recognize that at the moment only Kurdistan fulfills the 
     conditions for being a region. Using the Kurdish experience 
     as a model, the Constitution must define the minimum 
     conditions that need to be met by any group of provinces that 
     desire to form themselves into a region. Then set a 
     moratorium of 10 years on the establishment of new regions, 
     this being the time necessary to crush the insurgency, 
     establish properly accountable institutions of law and order 
     and ensure that those applying for such status have met the 
     criteria.
       Limit the size of any new region formed after the 10-year 
     period to a maximum of three governorates and fix the 
     existing unmodified boundaries of the 18 governorates of Iraq 
     as the basis for the establishment of new regions.
       Delete Article 109, which allocates extra oil revenues to 
     the regions that generate them. There is no defensible case 
     for imposing special reparations on the Sunni populace for 
     the crimes of Iraq's former leaders.
       Appoint a committee of expert constitutional lawyers to 
     make the necessary amendments reconciling the legislature 
     with the executive and the different parts of the executive 
     with each other. This is not a matter that can be resolved by 
     the politicians alone.
       Democracy is not reducible to placing an Iraqi seal of 
     approval upon a situation that is manifestly worsening by the 
     day. The 79 percent of people who voted in favor of a 
     constitution that promotes ethnic and sectarian divisions are 
     unwittingly paving the way for a civil war that will cost 
     hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Nothing is worth that.
       Without the return of real power to the center, the ascent 
     of sectarian and ethnic politics in Iraq to the point of 
     complete societal breakdown cannot be checked. We cannot 
     fight the insurgency, rebuild Iraq and live in any meaningful 
     sense as part of the modern world without a state. There are 
     no human rights, no law, and no democracy without the state; 
     there is only anarchy and a state of insecurity potentially 
     much worse than what Iraqis are experiencing today. For 
     democracy to emerge out of the current chaos in Iraq, the 
     state must be saved from the irresponsibility of the Iraqi 
     parties and voting blocs that are today killing it.

     

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