By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

In the early morning hours of February 22, 2006, armed men stormed the Askariya shrine in Samarra, sixty miles north of Baghdad. They handcuffed the four guards, and left them in a side room. Working for several hours, the men placed several hundred pounds of explosives at strategic points under the shrine's golden dome. At 6:55 A.M., they detonated the explosives, probably with a cell phone. The dome collapsed and a shrine dating back to the ninth century was in ruins.

Within hours of the shrine's destruction, black-clad members of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia named for the twelfth Imam, took control of key points around Baghdad. Shiites then launched attacks on Sunni mosques around Baghdad. Intimidated by the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Army and the U.S. military did not intervene. Some Iraqi police, the beneficiaries of a multibillion-dollar U.S. training program, joined the attackers while others looked on. Three Sunni Imams were killed that day in Baghdad. In Basra, a Shiite mob broke into a jail, seized ten foreign Arabs who had been jailed on suspicion of terrorism, and shot them. The next day, Sunni Arabs pulled forty-seven Shiites off buses near the mixed Sunni-Shiite city of Baquba and executed them. In order to keep people away from inflammatory sermons expected at Friday prayers two days following the attack, Iraq's Shiite-dominated government imposed a twenty-four-hour curfew on Baghdad. Even so, twentynine bodies turned up around the city. The victims had been handcuffed and shot in the head, an indication that they were Sunnis picked up by the police-or Shiite militia wearing police uniforms-and killed.

In Iraq's civil war, the United States is in the middle. Sunni Arabs believe the United States delivered Iraq to the Shiites and the Iranians. In the February 2006 pogroms, they blamed the U.S. military for standing aside while Shiites destroyed Sunni mosques. The Shiites accused the United States of having sided with the Sunnis in the period leading up to the attack in Samarra. Abdul Aziz al- Hakim, the leader of Iraq's most influential Shiite party, charged that the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, had given the terrorists "a green light" when he criticized the human rights record ofIraq's Shiite-led security forces. Shiites refer to Khalilzad, a Sunni Muslim who is a naturalized American originally from Afghanistan, as ''Abu Omar;' a reference to the second Sunni Caliph, who, in the Shiite view, usurped the legitimate succession to the prophet in the seventh century. Moqtada claims the Americans are much worse then Saddam, and the only reason why, they invaded Iraq is in order to assassinate the ‘Mahdi,’ whose return the Americans knew, was imminent.

Yet not long before, on March 19, 2006, the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote an article for the Washington Post. In it, he made the usual claims of progress: Iraq's security forces are robust and democracy is on the march. Even the bombing of the Askariya mosque in Samarra on February 22 had a silver lining, since the aftermath demonstrated that "the vast majority of Iraqis want their country to remain whole and free of ethnic conflict."

Then came a startling admission: "If we retreat now, there is every reason to believe Saddamists and terrorists will fill the vacuum. Turning our backs on postwar Iraq would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis."

Given that the United States was still fighting in Iraq with the same number of troops that it used to invade Iraq three years before, one might have hoped for candor from the secretary of defense. Iraq's security forces are a major factor in the country's descent into civil war and the widening chasm between Iraq's ethnic and sectarian communties is far more significant than the (sometimes insincere) lip service paid to national unity by Iraq's politicians. On the other hand, the consequences of an American withdrawal are not nearly as dire as Rumsfeld asserted. There is no chance that the Ba'athists will take over the country again. Before the Administration can level with the American people, it needs to face up to the truth itself.

There is no good solution to the mess in Iraq. The country has broken up and is in the throes of civil war. The United States cannot put the country back together again and it cannot stop the civil war. If it scales back its ambitions, it can help stabilize parts of the country and contain the civil war. But the U.S. needs to do so quickly. As long as the United States remains in Iraq pursuing impossible goals, the Administration is providing neither the leadership nor resources required to meet the most serious challenges to American security, including Iran's drive for nuclear weapons and the continued threat from al-Qaeda.

Iraq's constitutional referendum held October 15, 2005, and the election of the Council of Representatives (the new name for the parliament) two months later on December 15 confirmed how divided Iraq is. In the October referendum, each of three purely Kurdish governorates approved the constitution with 99 percent voting yes. The yes vote in the nine southern Shiite governorates ranged from 95 to 98 percent. By contrast, the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab Salahaddin Governorate voted 81 percent against and the entirely Sunni Arab Anbar Province voted 97 percent against. The constitution was approved because the Sunni Arab majority in Nineveh Province (which includes Mosul) is only about 60 percent. Nineveh rejected the constitution with a 54 percent no vote, less than the two- thirds needed for the Sunni Arabs to defeat the constitution altogether." In the December Council of Representatives elections, fewer than 2 percent of Iraq's Kurds voted for non-Kurdish parties while fewer than 15 percent of Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites voted for nonsectarian parties. The constitution's many critics argue that it is a formula for the breakup of the country. Actually, it may be the last chance to hold the country together. Iraq's Kurds do not want to be part of Iraq, a country most of them hate. However, they know that pursuing formal independence is risky and therefore may settle for the indefinite continuation of their de facto independence as allowed by this constitution. Outside pressure for a more unified Iraq will only intensify the demand for independence, as Bremer's misadventure in nation-building illustrated. And no one should be under any illusions about the long term. The moment the international environment permits an independent Kurdistan, the Kurds will declare it.

The sectarian divisions between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite Arabs may not be unbridgeable. Religion has never been as important a part of Iraqi politics as it is now," and its importance may recede over time. Iraq's professional, business, and bureaucratic elite has long been secular, and many are bewildered by the emphasis in Iraq today on whether one is Shiite or Sunni. These have never been important considerations for them, and they have a hard time comprehending its importance to a class of Iraqis that they don't know. Democracy has released passions in Iraq, including Shiite enthusiasm, that have yet to run their course (and may not).

With sectarian civil war under way, Iraq's Sunni and Shiites are moving further apart. Iraq's system of loose federalism allows each community to develop its own political and social institutions in security and without threatening the other. Thus, the Shiites can have their Iranian-style Islamic republic, but only in the Shiite parts of the country. With their own ministate, Iraq's Sunni Arab leaders will be up against the difficult task of governing rather than the easy route of opposition. A Sunni Arab government-whether neo- Ba'athist or Islamicist-will have strong incentives to crack down on the insurgents.

From an American perspective, none of this is attractive. Few Americans would have supported an invasion of a WMD-Iess Iraq in order to have half the country become an Iranian satellite with a theocratic government. But this result is better than having a national government allied with Tehran trying to impose a Shiite theocracy on all Iraq. Based on the December election results, the Sunni Arab entity will also likely elect Islamicists but with a significant part of the population supporting the neo-Ba'athists. There is no guarantee that a Sunni Arab regional government will in fact be able to exercise effective control over its area or that it will be willing and able to take on the insurgents. However, an elected government providing for security with its own military has a better chance for creating stability in the Sunni Arab parts of Iraq than does a Shiite national army serving what Sunni Arabs see as an alien and treasonous government in Baghdad.

Yes, Iraq's three-state solution could lead to the country's dissolution. But there will be no reason to mourn Iraq's passing. Iraq has brought virtually nonstop misery to the 80 percent of its people who are not Sunni Arabs and could be held together only by force. Almost certainly, Kurdistan's full independence is just a matter of time. As a moral matter, Iraq's Kurds are no less entitled to independence than are Lithuanians, Croatians, or Palestinians. And if Iraq's Shiites want to run their own affairs, or even have their own state, on what democratic principle should they be denied? If the price of a unified Iraq is another dictatorship, it is too high a price to pay.

Instead, at the beginning of 2006, the Administration invested heavily in diplomatic efforts aimed at forming a national unity government that included the Shiites, Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and secularists. As the largest bloc in the parliament, the UIA coalition had the right to nominate the prime minister. The Administration's preferred candidate was the SCIRI nominee, Adel Abdul Mehdi, the French-educated economist and a relative liberal (who, ironically, Bremer had vetoed for interim prime minister in 2004). Mehdi was well liked by the Kurds and generally acceptable to the Sunni Arabs in the Council of Representatives. On February 12, the UIA parliamentarians met at Abdul Aziz alHakim's fortified riverfront residence in Baghdad and, by 64-63 vote, chose the incumbent Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari for a second term over Mehdi. Moqtada al-Sadr, who sponsored thirty of the parliamentarians on the UIA list, strongly supported Jaafari, giving him sixty votes when combined with Jaafari's own thirty-member Dawa block. Al-Sadr allegedly intimidated several wavering independents on the Shiite list into supporting Jaafari, providing his margin of victory.

American policy makers are reflexively committed to the unity of Iraq, as they were to the unity of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The conventional response to discussions of Iraq's breakup is to say it would be destabilizing. This is a misreading of Iraq's modern history. It is the holding of Iraq together by force that has been destabilizing. This has led to big armies, repressive governments, squandered oil revenues, genocide at home, and aggression abroad. Today, America's failed effort to build a unified and democratic Iraq has spawned a ferocious insurgency and a Shiite theocracy.

In his 2000 election campaign George W. Bush spoke of the need for humility in our approach to the world. Yet we went into Iraq with the arrogant belief that we could remake the country as we wanted it to be. We failed miserably. We should do now what we should have done at the start-defer to the peoples of Iraq. They have concluded that a single country is not possible, except in' name. they have incorporated what is effectively a 'three-state solution into a constitution' overwhelmingly approved by 80 percent of the population. It is true tJ;1at the Sunni Arabs did not accept the constitution, but what was the alternative? A constitution acceptable to the Sunni Arabs would have been rejected by 80 percent of the country.

Although the UIA had close to an absolute majority in the parliament, the constitution provides that the three-man Presidency Council (consisting of the president and two vice presidents) must unanimously nominate the prime minister, in effect giving the Kurds and Sunni Arabs a veto over the choice. Talabani took the lead in opposing Jaafari and was supported both by the Kurdish parliamentarians and the two Sunni Arab blocks. Khalilzad also encouraged the opposition to Jaafari whom the Administration viewed as divisive, ineffective, and too close to al-Sadr. The result was deadlock. As long as Jaafari insisted on remaining the UIA nominee, the Shiite coalition refused to reconsider the choice for fear that doing so would fracture the UIA. The impasse over the prime minister prevented the Council of Representatives from convening (except briefly) and from electing its officers and a new Presidency Council. At the beginning of April, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made an unannounced visit to Baghdad to pressure the parties to reach an agreement. Jaafari's supporters (and some of his foes) criticized the U.S. and Britain for interfering in an internal Iraqi matter and said the trip was counterproductive.

On April 20-more than four months after the elections-Jaafari finally quit his effort to stay in office. As part of the deal by which Jaafari withdrew, Dawa got to nominate his successor. They chose the UIA spokesman, Nuri al-Maliki, as the new candidate for prime minister. President Bush quickly embraced the choice, saying "The Iraqi people have rejected the terrorists' effort to divide them, and they have chosen the path of unity for their nation." In fact, the Bush Administration knew next to nothing about Maliki, including his first name. (U.S. diplomats had assumed that his nom de guerre, Jawad, was his real name.) The State Department, in planning the Secretary's trips to Iraq including the one two weeks before Maliki's designation, did not consider him important enough to put on her schedule which was otherwise packed with meetings with Iraqi politicians. Like all of Dawa's principal leaders, Maliki spent much of his life in exile, but unlike Jaafari who lived in London and speaks English, Maliki took refuge in Iran and then Syria. He served as deputy chairman of the constitution drafting committee,* earning a reputation as a hardliner opposed to compromises with the Sunni Arabs on de- Ba' athification and as an advocate of a more centralized Iraqi government than was tolerable to the Kurds or SCIRI. Maliki had no experience in government and never headed a major political movement. The Kurds considered him too sectarian for the job, and the Sunni Arabs also had misgivings, but President Bush's swift embrace and American pressure to form a government-any government-led both groups to decide to go along with Maliki.

With the nomination of Maliki, the Council of Representatives at last met on April 22 to elect the president, the two vice presidents, and the speaker of the parliament. Talabani was re-elected as president and Adel Abdul Mehdi continued as one of the vice presidents. Since a Shiite was prime minister and a Kurd president, the speaker of the Council of Representatives needed to be a Sunni Arab. The Sunni Arabs initially wanted Tariq al-Hashimi, the head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, to fill the slot, but the Kurds and Shiites opposed him as too extreme. Instead, Hashimi became a vice president, where he can veto any presidential act including signing legislation into law (the three- man Presidency Council must act unanimously). For speaker, the Sunni Arabs nominated Mahmoud al-Mashhadani. In his speech to the Council of Representatives after his election, Mashhadani warned, "The unity of Iraq is an obligation for all of us. Any hand or tongue that harms this unity by wrong doing or provocation deserves to be cut off." Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Kurdish political leader and frequent spokesman for the Kurdish side, described the speech as "alarming."

Iraq's "government of national unity" is hardly that. It is made up of leaders with diametrically opposed goals. Among the very top leaders, only Talabani and Mehdi have experience in government, including a record of being able to make the compromises necessary for Iraq's consensus-oriented decision-making procedures to work. The others are known primarily for their strong views. Iraq's government is not likely to function very well. But, even if it did, there is a more pertinent question: what will the government govern?

Not Kurdistan. The Kurdistan Regional Government insists on its constitutional authority to run its region. Baghdad ministries are not allowed even to open offices in the north.

Not the Shiite south. It is run by a patchwork of municipal and governorate officials who front for the clerics, religious parties, and militias who are the real power in the south. Without regard to the freedoms promised in Iraq's interim and permanent constitutions, the south has been ruled as an Islamic state where militias and religious police enforce religious law with varying degrees of strictness. Basra's rulers have tapped into Iraq's oil wealth, siphoning off billions of dollars' worth of oil between the last metering point near Basra city and the loading terminal in the Persian Gulf.

Not the Sunni Arab heartland. It is a battleground. The American military, assisted by Shiite troops, are at war with insurgents and foreign terrorists. Many Sunni Arabs despise both sides of this battle, but it does not mean they will accept the authority of a Shiite-led government that they see as installed by the Americans and aligned with Iran.

Not Baghdad, at least outside the Green Zone. Even before the sharp escalation of sectarian violence in February 2006, Iraq's capital was a city of armed camps. Nine-foot-high concrete walls, known as Bremer barriers, surround public buildings, hotels, and the residences of the rich and powerful. Wealthy Iraqis maintain private armies for security.

Ministers and other top government officials use their own militias for protection, or borrow peshmerga forces from the Kurds. Only the reckless would rely on the police or Iraqi Army for protection, unless those units were in fact peshmerga or militias in the guise of being Iraqi Army or police. Outside the Green Zone and the private fortresses, Baghdad's misery is compounded by an explosion of violent crime-murder, kidnapping for ransom, armed robbery, and rape that is the consequence of the breakdown of authority.

After February 22, the killings in the world's most dangerous city became more numerous, less targeted, and crueler. In late March, fourteen corpses were dumped in AI Adil, a Sunni neighborhood that is an insurgent stronghold. According to the Sunday Telegraph, each man's identity card was neatly placed on his chest, and the police quickly noticed that they all had the same first name, Omar. Omar was the second Caliph, and is reviled by Shiites as an usurper. Sunnis and Shiites are now killed for wearing the wrong clothes, speaking with the wrong accent, or having the wrong name. The daily body count in Baghdad in early 2006 was averaging forty a day, with many corpses found with eyes gouged out, flesh drilled, and other marks of beastly torture.

Most of Iraq's ministries are outside the Green Zone, though many ministers live inside. Going to work involves a dangerous transit through a Green Zone checkpoint and the prospect of being stuck for hours in Baghdad's traffic jams, congestion made worse by periodic bombs and the closing of many streets for security reasons. Regardless of the size of his or her security detail, a minister stuck in traffic is a sitting duck. Most ministers rarely go to their offices, and instead spend their days visiting colleagues in the Green Zone. There is much talk at the highest levels of Iraq's government, but little government.

The situation in Iraq should be blindingly obvious to the top U.S. officials who visit. After three years of an American occupation, they cannot leave the Green Zone, stay overnight, or even move within the Green Zone without a security detail the size of a small army." The Bush Administration may wish that Iraq were different, but wishes will not change the reality. Perhaps Administration officials can console themselves with the thought that Iraq's breakup was probably inevitable once Saddam left the scene, as eventually he would have. Iraq's Sunniimposed forced unity was already coming apart before the invasion (Kurdistan was gone from 1991) and the U.S. merely hastened the end.

Even when the United States and Great Britain had full legal authority in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, they did nothing to arrest the breakup of the country. In the south, the British and the Americans allowed the Shiite clergy and religious parties to take power and to build their Islamic states. Although proclaiming a commitment to rule of law and the rights of women (as was to be embodied in the Transitional Administrative Law), they took no action to stop militias from enforcing dress codes on women, shutting down music shops and liquor stores (often murdering their Christian owners), and running their own court systems. While saying that Kurdistan should rejoin Iraq, nothing was done to reduce any part of Kurdistan's autonomy. While outlawing armed forces not part of the Iraqi Army, the coalition allowed militias to proliferate during the occupation and made no effort to disband any of them. If the coalition could not prevent Iraq's unraveling when it was fully in charge of the country, it is illogical now to put all the emphasis on building strong national institutions, such as a single Iraqi Army and powerful central government, when U.S. influence is much diminished.

With the American people today, overwhelmingly viewing the war as a mistake and Bush's approval levels reaching Nixonian lows, the United States will not now engage in the kind of aggressive nation-building that it failed to do when it had more authority. In short, an independent Kurdistan, a theocratic south, militias, sectarian control of the police and army-all are facts of life in Iraq. The Administration has no intention of changing any of this. The Administration needs to be honest with itself and with the American people. Only by acknowledging how little it will accomplish can the Administration chart a way out of the Iraq mess.

Eleven of Iraq's eighteen governorates are secure." This provides the starting point for an exit strategy. Kurdistan comprises three gover norates in their entirety and parts of three others. The peshmerga (the Kurdistan Regional Guard) is Iraq's most capable military force and the only one that is reliably pro-American. The United States should want to strengthen its only friends in Iraq. This means providing technical assistance to help make the Kurdistan Regional Government more effective in the delivery of services such as education, policing, and health care. Already, the Administration is promoting Kurdistan to investors as the safe part of Iraq that could be the gateway to the rest of the country. This should be continued. And, while Kurdistan justifiably boasts of being the most democratic part of Iraq, political reforms are needed in a region where two main parties have dominated politics for decades. U.S.-sponsored democracy programs would find fertile ground among Kurdistan's urban elite, media, and academics. The peshmerga's capabilities should be enhanced with training, armored vehicles, heavy weapons, and helicopters. As noted, these are America's friends, and the United States may need their assistance in future operations within Iraq.

The Kurds fought alongside the Americans to overthrow Sad dam in 2003. They consistently supported U.S. policy during the CPA period and afterward. In the negotiations on Iraq's government in 2006, Khalilzad used the Kurds to push the American agenda, which included blocking Ibrahim al- Jaafari's candidacy. For their collaboration with a country most Arab Iraqis see as the enemy, the Kurds could pay a price. The U.S. has a moral debt to an ally. Arming the peshmerga is one way to discharge that debt. The U.S. could promise air support in the event of an Iraqi attack north, and it might consider keeping a small base in Kurdistan both to protect the Kurds and as insurance against a terrorist takeover in the Sunni Arab parts of the country. While there are compelling arguments against permanent bases in Arab Iraq, the Kurds want American bases in Kurdistan.

Looking ahead, a fully independent Kurdistan appears to be a matter of when, not if. The younger generation of Kurdish leaders (those in their forties and younger) have no use for Iraq and will press for full independence as soon as the situation allows. If Kurdistan's borders are settled, its secession will have a limited impact on the rest of the country.

Ahmad Chalabi, the Deputy Prime Minister, has publicly said the Kurds have the right to secede. Ayad Allawi told me the same thing when I interviewed him for ABC News in Baghdad in 2003, although he said Kurdistan's separation should be negotiated and not unilateral. With settled borders, the split between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq could be more like Czechoslovakia's velvet divorce than Yugoslavia's wars. With more Kurds living within their borders than live in Iraq, Turkey and Iran both oppose an independent Kurdistan." Because of its size and its strategic importance to the United States as a NATO ally, Turkey has long been considered the major obstacle to Kurdish dreams for an independent state.

Of course, Turkey remains adamantly opposed to a fully independent Kurdistan. But Turks no longer see it as the threat they once did, and many recognize that it is inevitable. Iran, which has historically supported Kurdish separatists in Iraq, may be the more ferocious opponent of a fully independent Kurdistan in Iraq. Developments in Iraq have inspired Iranian Kurds to demand more rights, frightening the Tehran regime into brutal crackdowns in 2004 and 2005. Iran, however, has many fewer options to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdistan in Iraq. The United States and its allies would not tolerate a direct military intervention. Subversion and terrorism, Iran's usual policy instruments in such circumstances, can inflict pain but cannot deter a Kurdistan determined on independence. And, in any event, Iran's primary interest in Iraq is in the Shiite south.

If the Shiite south forms a region, it can set up a government and establish a Regional Guard. The government will be theocratic, and the Guards will consist mostly of militias (probably the Badr Organization since SCIRI dominates politically eight of Iraq's nine southern governorates). Even so, an elected Regional Government with a Guard responsible to it would be preferable to the current ad hoc system of informal Islamic rule enforced by sometimes competing militias. By providing technical assistance to a southern government, the U.S. and its coalition partners may have some influence on internal developments. Even a theocratic government can provide the political and economic stability needed to permit new investments in producing the south's vast oil reserves.

A two-way split into Arab Iraq and Kurdistan is much more likely in the near future than a three-way split into Kurdistan, a Sunni state, and a Shiite state. The question is whether Iraq's Sunni and Shiite regions (assuming they are created) will eventually want to become independent. Although being Shiite is a religious identity, many Shiites talk as if it were an "ethnic" or national identity. This is not as unusual as it may sound. Tito's Yugoslavia considered the Muslims in Bosnia to be an ethnic group, not just a religious one. ><- Anecdotal evidence suggests that Iraq's Shiite masses may be more strongly in favor of selfgovernment and more "Shiite nationalistic" than their leaders, except for SCIRI. In the 1920s, many Basra residents wanted their own state (akin to Kuwait), and there has been a revival of Basra separatism since 2003. It is a complicating factor, as a Basra state would not include Shiite areas such as Najaf and Karbala but would have most of Iraq's oil. Civil war, in which so many Shiites have been killed because of their identity, accelerates the development of a Shiite nationalism and may fuel demands for a separate Shiite state.

Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak probably overstated the case when he told al-Arabiya on April 9, 2006, that the Arab world's Shiites are more loyal to Iran than their own countries, but he did not totally miss the mark either. No matter how the Shiite south evolves, Iran will be the dominant power. Partition, whether into loosely confederated regions as envisioned under Iraq's constitution or into fully independent states, may limit Iran's influence to the southern half of Iraq.

The continued presence of American and British military forces in Iraq's south can only aggravate relations with the Shiite authorities without any corresponding gain in what is a relatively secure part of Iraq. In 2005, British troops clashed on several occasions with local police and militias, with one incident where British forces attacked a police station nearly escalating out of control." As long as the coalition remains in the south, there is a risk of more incidents. Troops should be withdrawn in a rapid but orderly fashion.

A coalition withdrawal from the south will strengthen the position of the United States and the Europeans as they try to devise a strategy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. With coalition troops in the south, the U.S. has no military option, and the Iranians know it. Once out of southern Iraq, the United States and Great Britain will have more negotiating power precisely because a military optionalbeit still an unattractive one-will exist.

In the Sunni Arab governorates, the United States faces a dilemma. The American military presence among hostile Sunni Arabs seems to generate an endless supply of new suicide bombers and insurgent fighters. If the United States withdraws from the Sunni heartland, even more territory may fall into the hands of insurgents and terrorists. In the worst case, Iraq's Sunni heartland could become what Afghanistan was under the Taliban: a secure base from which terrorists could plot attacks on the United States.

The pogroms that followed the destruction of the Askariya shrine served as a wake-up call to many Sunni Arabs. In a Sunni-Shiite civil war, Sunni Arabs realize, they will lose. Some of America's most vocal foes changed their position from demanding a u.s. withdrawal to asking for U.S. protection. In Fallujah, Sunni tribal leaders from the surrounding villages sent their tribesmen to join a Fallujah brigade of the Iraqi Army that the U.S. was trying to create. They seem to have concluded that it is better to have local Sunni Arabs protecting the city than to leave it to Shiite soldiers.

Sunni Arabs may come to see the formation of a region as essential for self-protection and therefore be less worried that federalism will lead to the dissolution of Iraq. If the Sunnis establish a regional guard, it could take over security responsibilities from the Americans and from the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army. The United States could then withdraw while making clear that American forces would return only if the regional authorities allowed al-Qaeda and other anti-Western terrorists to operate freely from the region. If the Sunni Arabs do not form a region, the United States should still withdraw, and leave security duties to the Iraqi Army, which would presumably continue to use Shiite forces there.

Since the U.S. withdrawal from the Sunni heartland is necessarily conditional on the regional authorities suppressing the terrorists, the U.S. will need to keep a force nearby, ready to intervene if they fail. Kurdistan is the ideal location. It is close, the local population friendly, and it is still in Iraq. Locating an "over-the-horizon" force outside Iraq, as some have suggested, would make it politically difficult to return, to the detriment of the U.S. ability to fight terrorists. Once U.S. forces were out of Iraq, there would be enormous domestic opposition within the United States to going back in. Given how it misrepresented the intelligence on Iraqi WMD before the war, the Administration would have a hard time making a convincing case for intervention even if it had good intelligence on a terrorist threat. A divided Iraqi Government might find it hard to reach agreement to allow U.S. forces to return.

Partition works as a political solution for Kurdistan, the Shiite south, and the Sunni Arab center because it formalizes what has already taken place. Partition is the reason Kurdistan is stable and the south relatively so. It is an Iraqi solution, embodied in the constitution, and not an imposed one. By contrast, the American effort to build a unified state with a nonsectarian, nonethnic police and army has not produced that result nor made much progress toward it. If the U.S. were to try seriously, it would destabilize the parts of Iraq that are today secure. The Kurds will resist violently any effort to make them more than nominally Iraqi, while the creation of mixed Sunni/Shiite units in the military and police in the context of civil war is a recipe for ineffectiveness, and possibly violence within the unit.

Accepting partition is a way to get most coalition forces out of Iraq quickly. It does not solve the problem of Baghdad. That is because there is no good solution.

No Iraqi armed force is trusted by both Baghdad's Shiites and its Sunnis. The police and the army are part of the problem. A Baghdad resident who encounters men in police uniforms may have no idea if they are bona fide police carrying out lawful duties, Shiite police commandos staging an abduction, or criminals masquerading as police. For a person with the wrong name, a police checkpoint can be deadly. The army is only somewhat better. In March 2006, the Ministry of Defense broadcast public service messages warning Baghdad residents against allowing either the police or the army to take them away, not that most people would have had a choice.

Theoretically, the United States has the power to provide some level of security in Baghdad. U.S. soldiers would have to become the city's police, manning checkpoints, confiscating weapons, arresting criminals as well as terrorists, and disarming powerful militias, including those within the police and army. It would mean a radically different mission, require many more troops, and result in many more casualties. And it may not work. U.S. troops, operating without necessary language skills and local knowledge, and rightly concerned with protecting themselves, are not a good substitute for reliable Iraqi police men. In the current political environment in the United States, it is hard to imagine that there is any support for this role.

The alternative is to recognize that there is not much that the United States is able and willing to do to stop the bloodshed in Baghdad. Once they get started, modern civil wars develop a momentum of their own. Atrocities tend to produce new atrocities and rarely the revulsion needed to bring them to an end. Most people, of course, do not want a civil war and do not condone sectarian killing. Civil war empowers the most extreme elements, and over time, more people gravitate toward the extremists on their side. The alternative is the extremists on the other side. Advocating moderation becomes dangerous as it equates to treason toward one's own community.

In recent times, outside powers have intervened to end similar wars. Syrian troops ended Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war in 1989 and then stayed on for another fifteen years. NATO deployed to stop the war in Bosnia, and European troops are still there eleven years later. Foreign troops have been essential to the tenuous peace that now exists in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Congo.

There are no foreign forces that will play this role in Baghdad. The United States is unwilling. The Arab League could be asked for troops, but this would require a substantial deployment from the largest and militarily most capable Arab country, Egypt. Iraq's Shiite government may object to troops from any Sunni Arab country, and they certainly will not want troops from a country whose president sees them as disloyal agents of Iran. Iranian troops would be objectionable to Sunni Arabs in Iraq, to Iraq's Sunni neighbors, and to the United States. The Kurds have opposed any role for Turkish troops, and Turkey is, in any event, not willing to devote its army to a thankless and dangerous peacekeeping mission. There is a danger that factions in Iraq's escalating civil war will ask for more assistance from their allies than they presently receive. It is not far-fetched to imagine Iranian troops assisting Iraq's Shiite government while troops from Sunni Arab countries assist the Sunnis. In this way, Iraq's civil war could spill over the country's borders.

Civil war is not inevitable when states break up, as the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia showed. In Yugoslavia in the spring of 1991, the United States and Europe put all their diplomatic energy into a doomed effort to keep the country together when they should have focused on preventing the war that followed. Two hundred thousand people died in a war that might have been prevented with more realistic policies. The same mistake should not be made in Iraq, a country already in a civil war.

Iraq's civil war is the messy end of a country that never worked as a voluntary union and that brought misery to most of its people most of the time. By invading Iraq and mismanaging the aftermath, the United States precipitated Iraq's collapse as a unified state but did not cause it. Partition-the Iraqi solution-has produced stability in most of the country and for this reason should be accepted. In Baghdad and other mixed Sunni-Shiite areas, the United States cannot contribute to the solution because there is no solution, at least in the foreseeable future. It is a tragedy, and it is unsatisfying to admit that there is little that can be done about it. But it is so. No purpose is served by a prolonged American presence anywhere in Arab Iraq. The war's architects believed they could change the Middle East. And so they did.

 

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