IRAQ - Popular Sovereignty & What Follows.

The success of this military strategy, however, depends on a political gamble. As democratisation is the centerpiece of US policy, other goals - power sharing, regional stability, Iraqi territorial integrity - receive scant mention, in the hope these will flow from an unimpeded byplay of popular sovereignty, oddly enough with Iranian support.

The US is betting that popular sovereignty will produce a stable Shiite/Kurdish regime, with Sunni participation, capable of raising, motivating and sustaining effective counter-insurgency forces. But Sunni Arabs invited to take part in drafting a permanent constitution have come up with the opposite of what Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had hoped for: The Association of Muslim Scholars want to draft their own Sunni Arab version of a permanent constitution, one in which Islam should be the only source of legislation in Iraq (see Gas Market Trends of this week's APS Review in gmt20).

The impact of the Iraqi elections has been to accelerate the transformation of a broadly based nationalist resistance to US occupation into a more narrowly based Sunni resistance to Shiite domination. Violence is increasingly breaking down along sectarian lines. James Dobbins, a former US assistant secretary of state and special envoy for Afghanistan, recently wrote: "This mutation of a nationalist resistance movement into a Sunni insurgency has an obvious upside for US policy. There is no doubt that a Sunni-based insurgency will ultimately be defeated by the combined weight of Shiite and Kurdish opposition, particularly when those two communities can count on the support of both the US and Iran".

What remains "a bit less certain", Dobbins adds, is whether Shiite and Kurdish weight will indeed be combined. "It is fair to say that Iraq is already in the midst of a kind of civil war, though - crucially - still an unconventional one. Just as there is no danger of the Sunni minority prevailing against the Shiite and Kurdish majority, so there is no danger of a Sunni insurgency escalating into conventional war". Dobbins adds: The only danger of a full-scale conventional civil war would arise from "a falling out" between the Kurdish and Shiite leaderships over control of the Kirkuk oilfields and population centres in northern Iraq, or "from violent divisions within the Shiite community itself".

Like most policy choices, Dobbins notes, the US shift of focus to democratic reform was prompted by conviction and calculation. He says: "One need not doubt the sincerity of the president's commitment to democratic change to note that this theme represents the sole remaining justification for an increasingly expensive and unpopular war", asdemocratisation provides a rationale for US policy towards the Middle East which his critics at home and abroad find relatively difficult to fault. But Bush's uncritical embrace of popular sovereignty could complicate his ability to promote the kind of power-sharing arrangements which will be necessary to hold Iraq together. This stance limits the ability of the US to promote a regional consensus in favour of an emergent Iraqi regime.

Dobbins says power sharing is "something which Tehran, Ankara, Amman and Riyadh understand and could conceivably agree upon". Democracy, particularly Iraqi democracy, "is not". So if the first scenario for Iraq as mentioned above is not possible, Dobbins sees the second as follows: "a more violent but ultimately still successful suppression of the Sunni insurgency by Shiite and Kurdish forces, with US and Iranian support". But why should Iran's Ja'fari theocracy back a Shiite Arab/Kurdish alliance as well as the US project in Iraq when it is being threatened by the US at the same time (see this week's News Service in news20bbIranNukeMay16-05).

The 3rd Scenario: The third alternative is a real, conventional civil war. Dobbins sees this with Kurds in one corner, Sunnis in another and the Shiites fighting among themselves.

In an article published by the International Herald Tribune, Dobbins concludes: "It is the recent progress toward formation of a broadly based, democratic Iraqi government that makes the first and best option a distinct possibility". (James Dobbins now directs the International Security and Defence Policy Centre at RAND Corp).