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Iraq's constitution: From Dayton to
Baghdad |
By James Dobbins
International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27,
2005
| WASHINGTON The last time American
diplomats locked a group of prospective founding fathers in a room
with orders not to come out until they had a constitution was a
decade ago, in Dayton, Ohio. The founding fathers in question
represented Bosnia's Muslim, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian
communities.
Like the current efforts
in Baghdad, the negotiation in Dayton went into overtime. In the
end, that conference succeeded in arriving at a settlement that
ended the fighting in Bosnia, but failed to produce a workable
arrangement for the governance of that nation. As a result, 10 years
on, Bosnia continues to be a ward of the international community,
secured by an international peacekeeping force and governed by an
international proconsul.
In Baghdad today, as in
Dayton 10 years ago, observers have established three major criteria
for success. First, can the negotiators meet their self-imposed
deadline? Second, can they produce a result that all three groups -
in the Iraqi case the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities - can
abide by? And third, will that result provide a workable arrangement
for the future government of a unified Iraq?
Of these three
considerations, the second is by far the most important. Any result
that does not engage the three major parties will be worse than no
result at all. It is right, therefore, that both the timetable and
the actual contents of any constitution take second place to this
essential requirement.
This was certainly the
calculus made by American diplomats a decade ago in Dayton. The
results demonstrate their wisdom. Bosnia remains at peace today.
True, the concessions made to each of the three ethnic groups at
Dayton, in terms of local autonomy and power-sharing arrangements,
produced an unworkable arrangement for government that continues to
require international oversight. Yet, even if one cannot foresee an
end to this involvement, the international investment in military
manpower and economic assistance needed to preserve the peace in
Bosnia goes down steadily each year.
There are, of course,
big differences between the constitutional processes under way in
Baghdad and the one that took place a decade ago in Dayton. Perhaps
the most important difference is that 10 years ago the international
community was prepared to guarantee the resulting settlement in
Bosnia by deploying a very large peacekeeping force. Allowing for
Bosnia's smaller size and population, the peacekeeping force
deployed into Bosnia to assure implementation of the Dayton accords
was nearly three times larger than the current American led
coalition in Iraq. Nearly 80 percent of that force came from
countries other than the United States.
Unfortunately, no
international commitment of this sort will be forthcoming for Iraq.
On the contrary, whereas agreement at Dayton was a precondition for
greater international involvement, agreement in Baghdad upon a new
constitution it is seen by the United States as a precondition for
troop reductions.
This means that unlike
Bosnia, Iraq will actually have to function under whatever
constitutional arrangements emerge from the current negotiating
process. A Bosnia-style outcome, which splits Iraq into three
hostile, untrusting and largely autonomous areas, without mechanisms
to compel compromise among them, could ultimately lead to an even
wider civil conflict than the one already under way.
At present there seems a
real danger that the Iraqi constitutional process could fail to meet
its main objectives, except, give or take a week or two, the
self-imposed deadline. If Shiite and Kurd representatives vote to
adopt the current draft over Sunni objections, the civil war will
intensify. If the constitution adopted leads to the establishment of
autonomous Kurdish and Shiite states, each with control over the oil
revenues in their respective areas, neither entity will have much
incentive to hold the country together for long.
The Dayton accord was a
major accomplishment for American diplomacy, and its lead
representative, Richard Holbrooke. Today in Baghdad, the U.S.
ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, faces an even more difficult task,
with much more at stake, and with far fewer cards to play. He must
sustain the time pressure, without which nothing is likely to be
achieved. He must ensure that Sunni concerns are accommodated. And
he must ensure that the result provides for a workable Iraqi state
that can fight a virulent insurgency and hold the country together
once American and other international forces leave.
(James Dobbins was
the Clinton administration's special envoy for Somalia, Haiti,
Bosnia and Kosovo, and the Bush administration's first envoy for
Afghanistan. He is director of the International Security and
Defense Policy Center at Rand Corp.)
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