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On March 26, 2007, the Arab League declared "that the Iraqi Government should be a national government for all Iraqis - a real national unity government - and respecting the will of the Iraqi people in all its components to decide their political future." On May 2, 2007, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom put Iraq on its watch list for violators explaining that "the Iraqi government has engaged in human rights violations through its state security forces, including arbitrary arrest, prolonged detention without due process, extrajudicial executions, and torture" and "the Iraqi government tolerates religiously based attacks and other religious freedom abuses carried out by armed Shi'a factions including the Jaysh al-Mehdi (Mahdi Army) and the Badr Organization." In a U.S. Congress in which almost every opportunity to find disagreement between the Democrats and Republicans is seemingly exploited with an efficiency that would make corporate "Six Sigma" programs appear wasteful in comparison, both sides have joined together to condemn the Iraqi parliament's plans to recess this July without their having approved national reconciliation and oil-sharing legislation. Considering that Iraq's present government is a sectarian government dedicated to advancing sectarian interests, such developments in Iraq are not surprising.
More such developments are likely in the absence of a legitimate national Iraqi government. Continuing absence of a legitimate national government will inhibit efforts to stabilize Iraq, much less put it on a path toward sustainable self-governance. An approach that winds up mainly advancing Shia aspirations for dominance is not a recipe for building a stable Iraq. Maintaining or tightening existing Sunni economic and political disenfranchisement will push Iraq further down the violent path of fragmentation. Continuing instability will create additional avenues by which outside actors, particularly Iran, Syria, and Al Qaeda, can stymie Iraq's evolution and threaten critical U.S. regional interests.
Considering the damage the sectarian government in Baghdad has already inflicted, the role it has played in perpetuating and exacerbating historic sectarian differences, and the consequences of maintaining such a government, it would serve Iraq's, the United States's, and the Middle East's interests if that government were replaced by a legitimate one comprised of all of Iraq's peoples and dedicated to serving all Iraqis. The biggest issue concerning Iraq is not whether the government headed by Nouri al-Maliki should go--it should--but how to bring about the legitimate national government Iraq urgently needs.
Although the U.S. and Iraq's neighbors cannot dissolve Iraq's present government, they can present incentives that would be attractive to Iraq's people and to a sufficient number of members of parliament to cause the Maliki government to fall and invite the formation of a new Iraqi government. Such incentives would include substantial reconstruction assistance, the elimination of most of Iraq's foreign debt, a financial mechanism to pay Iraq's former military personnel and civil servants (except for the senior most Ba'athist officials), and an opening of markets to Iraq's goods contingent on the adoption of a political settlement that makes a national government possible and the formation of that government.
The combination of a "regional concert" in the Middle East (Iraq's neighbors and the United States) and an international conference modeled after that held in Bonn in December 2001 to create a transitional government in Afghanistan offers perhaps the most viable route for achieving such an outcome. In the regional concert, the parties would commit to using their influence to bring Iraq's factions together in the aforementioned political conference, recognizing the new Iraqi government that would emerge, helping curb the flow of arms and armed elements into Iraq, and providing the economic assistance and trade incentives that would make it possible for Iraq to achieve robust and sustained economic growth.
The international conference could be hosted jointly by the Arab League, The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), and the United Nations. The visibility offered by such a role would give the Arab League and OIC a vested stake in Iraq's future. It would also undermine rejectionist arguments that the United States or West imposed a solution on Iraq and, therefore, the new Iraqi government lacked legitimacy.
The conference's hosts, the United States, Iraq's neighbors, and all of the factions enjoying appreciable support within Iraq (excepting only the Al Qaeda terrorist organization) would participate. They would work out a political framework that ensures basic protections for all of Iraq's peoples, facilitates the establishment of an inclusive interim government that represents all factions, and creates a quasi-governmental corporation that controls Iraq's oil resources and in which every Iraqi holds shares. Once the interim government is created, all armed groups would be folded into common Iraqi security and armed forces, a regional national guard similar to the state-based model in the U.S., or disarmed. Iraq's former military personnel and civil servants would either return to service or receive pensions.
This economic rehabilitation/pension program would reintegrate a sizable number of people back into Iraqi society and give them a meaningful stake in that society's future. For a rough estimate of possible costs, if one took the highest estimate of Iraq's prewar military/reserves personnel (1.7 million members) and offered each member an income/pension equivalent to Iraq's per capita GDP ($ 2,000), the program's costs would amount to about $ 3.4 billion per year. In comparison, current U.S. costs in Iraq are running at approximately $ 2 billion per week and these former military personnel and civil servants have little stake in supporting a society from which they have been largely excluded.
A pilot program that offers Iraqi youth financial incentives to renounce extremism and abandon extremist groups could also be put in place. In Saudi Arabia, such a program directed at imprisoned extremist youth has proved promising. Dr. Muhammad Al-Najimi, a member of the counseling committee that runs this program, explained, "80%-90% or even more [of the more than 1,000 youth who have participated in the program to date] have given up their extremist views..." Given the danger presented by extremist groups seeking to exploit the current situation in Iraq, an investment in such a program might well provide a firewall of sorts that minimizes the growth of such groups during Iraq's transitional period.
Iraq's existing Parliament would be asked to ratify the political settlement and new interim government, so as to avoid having to build Iraq's political architecture from scratch. Such a vote would be a mere formality, as the U.S., Iraq's neighbors, and Iraq's factions would have worked beforehand to win the commitment of a sufficient number of Parliamentarians to assure the outcome.
At this time, the odds of such a pragmatic approach are low. Neoconservative ideologues in Washington already hail Iraq as a "young democracy." They remain almost delusional to the reality that the current government in Baghdad is sectarian, not national. They remain mired in a fantasy in which they believe others, not themselves, do not understand "what's really happening in Iraq."
Nevertheless, with each passing day, the neoconservative foreign policy school is further discredited. Iraq, the very first grand neoconservative foreign policy project, is sliding further toward failed state status. "This thing is really coming undone quickly," Senator Chuck Hagel observed upon his returning from Iraq at the end of April. A Congress that is determined to bring about a better outcome to the current situation in Iraq could bolster prospects for such an outcome by abandoning its fruitless quest for military withdrawal timelines and instead throwing its support behind a political approach that would bring about a legitimate national government in Iraq.
