Deadline and a tough decision

The mutilation of three U.S. civilian security contractors, dragged by a Sunni mob through the streets of Fallujah, dramatically and horribly interrupted the progress toward an orderly transfer of authority to Iraqis on June 30. Six days later a dozen Marines were killed in nearby Ramadi.

Overall, Americans have suffered 600 killed and 3,400 wounded and the average of 200 per month can be predicted to continue so long as American troops carry the load of the occupation.

Early April also saw the first major violence from the more quiescent Shi’ite majority. In response to the closing of Sheik Moqtada al-Sadr’s newspaper and the arrest of one of his top aides, he told his supporters to be at the “utmost readiness and strike” the enemy. The next day demonstrations broke out in a half-dozen locations widely disbursed throughout Iraq. Nine soldiers, eight of them American, were killed and three-dozen wounded in the subsequent violent confrontations.

Two days later, after an arrest warrant was issued for Sheik al-Sadr, violent demonstrations broke out again across the southern part of the country.

America’s regent, L. Paul Bremer, responded correctly to the Fallujah outrage: “Their deaths will not go unpunished” and concluded, “these murders” are “painful” but “will not derail” our plans. Similar statements followed the other violence.

Senior State Department counterterrorism expert J. Cofer Black recently told Congress the allies have captured 70 percent of al Qaeda leaders and disrupted communications, and that less organized groups of locals and foreigners inspired by Osama bin Laden’s vision but acting independently have become the major problem. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit attributed the violence to “a cancer inside the society,” a reaction more consistent with mob frenzy and widespread killing.

But neither the Sunni cancer, the al-Sadr rabble-rousing nor the foreign jihadist threat are the greatest danger to American forces. Raw power can keep each under sufficient control to allow for an orderly transition.

The greatest danger comes from the seemingly most serene source, the majority of quiescent Shi’ites who are influenced by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

While he has been scrupulously nonviolent and restrained even in his speech, the Ayatollah Sustani is extremely forceful and has one bottom line, “a constitution for the country that preserves its unity.” The problem with his desired unity is that it threatens the militia-backed Kurdish bottom line of autonomy from the Arabs and the Sunnis’ demand that they not be ruled by what they consider heretical Shi’ite law.

Mr. Bremer has insisted upon a Transitional Administrative Law that divides rather than unifies power. Only three of its provisions matter. Forget about the widely praised Bill of Rights. The old Soviet Union had a wonderful statement of rights that was equally ineffective without a mechanism to guarantee it. The important provisions are for a federal system to separate the warring parties, a multiple executive with vetoes representing each of the three major parties to prevent abuses, and a provision that any three provinces can veto sections of the final constitution to guarantee that no critical group could have its essential interests violated.

Ayatollah al-Sistani, representing a 55 percent Shi’ite majority, wants a direct democracy. He objected to the three provisions and delayed the signing of the basic TA Law and, afterward, he obtained the support of 12 of the 13 Shi’ite members of the American-appointed council to revoke the critical provisions. Since then, a large network of Shi’ite clergy and supporters has organized widely and secured thousands of signatures on a petition to revoke the three provisions, which Ayatollah al-Sistani — backed by this majority — says remain “as obstacles to arriving at a permanent constitution.”

Given the instability, Democrats begin to question the June 30 deadline. The Senate Foreign Relations Committees’ ranking Democrat, Joseph Biden Jr. now says we will need “tens of thousands of troops for many years.” Sen. Carl Levin — the most aggressive and smartest partisan in the upper house and minority leader of the Armed Services Committee — says, if the conditions are not right on June 30, “the risks of turning over sovereignty outweigh the risks of not doing so.”

No matter how long the U.S. remains, the religious and ethnic divisions will persist as the continuing incidents and casualties in Bosnia and Kosovo prove. Turning over power is the last decision still wholly in the president’s hands. After that, the initiative swings to the Ayatollah al-Sistani.

President Bush must announce, and soon: “The United States has completed its mission in Iraq and will turn all authority to its people, as we promised, on June 30 of this year and, except for strategic troops in defensible bases, all American forces will be home after the January elections. Then it will be up to the Iraqis to complete the job.”

Donald Devine, former director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is editor of ConservativeBattleline.com, the American Conservative Union Foundation’s opinion journal.