The Bush administration wants to increase troop levels in Iraq, but there is nothing about the current US strategy that suggests more soldiers might help, writes Peter Galbraith.
The news from Iraq is so bad that even President Bush no longer describes successive disasters as evidence of progress. The Bush administration is now moving to increase troop levels in Iraq and is asking the British government to do the same.
A year ago, more troops (and, more critically, a plan on how to use them) might have made a difference. Most people in Iraq welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and many did cheer the coalition as liberators.
If the coalition had prevented the looting of Iraq's most important institutions, if it had restored essential services sooner, if it had had a coherent plan to transfer power to Iraqis, if it had deployed people knowledgeable about Iraq, if it had applied the lessons of successful post-conflict state-building such as in Bosnia and East Timor, there might be a different environment today. But there is nothing about the current strategy that suggests more might help.
Even if the coalition did everything right, its efforts are likely to fail as long as it persists with an idea of Iraq that does not exist.
In a recent speech, the American administrator Paul Bremer spoke of "the path to a new Iraq ... where the majority is not Sunni, Shia, Arab, Kurd or Turkoman, but Iraqi". Thousands of conversations, he said, had convinced him that this was the path desired by the vast majority of Iraqis.
I wonder to whom Bremer, who is ensconced in his fortified palace, has been talking.
Over the past 20 years, I have visited every corner of Iraqi Kurdistan and know well most of its leaders. I have never met an Iraqi Kurd who preferred Iraq to an independent Kurdistan, if that were a realistic alternative. Earlier this year, the Referendum Campaign, a coalition of Kurdish NGOs, collected 1.7 million signatures in Kurdistan (about two-thirds of the region's adults) signed a petition demanding a vote on independence.
Iraq's Shia, some 60 per cent of the population, express themselves primarily through their religious identity. During a recent trip to the south, I saw no sign of support for the secular parties, and the religious parties could well win an absolute majority in next year's elections. The Shia are not separatists, but rather feel their majority status gives them not only the right to govern all Iraq, but also to impose their version of an Islamic state.
In the past a small minority, the Sunni Arabs, have always run Iraq. Historically, they have been Iraqi nationalists, but they are also pan-Arabists. Arab nationalism (the core tenet of Ba'athism) connects the Sunni Arabs to the larger Arab world, and may become even more important as they come to terms with their loss of power and status.
Civil war is a more likely outcome in Iraq than democracy. There is growing tension between the secular Kurds and Shia religious leaders who want to make Iraq an Islamic state. The Shia have warned that they will not be bound by provisions of Iraq's transitional administrative law to ensure a role for the Kurds (and Sunni Arabs) in the writing of a permanent constitution. Kurdistan's leaders reply that their region will not stay in an Islamic state.
Coalition efforts to build a common Iraq risk provoking civil war. After the new Iraqi army and police went missing in Falluja, the coalition brought in Kurdish forces, ostensibly under a national Iraqi banner, to fight. Sunni Arabs vowed revenge.
By ousting Saddam, the coalition shattered an 80-year-old political system that brought unity through force.
Now, the best hope for holding Iraq together and avoiding civil war is to allow each of Iraq's three constituent communities the system it wants. Iraq's best chance for survival is as a loose federation of at least two, but more likely three, states - Kurdistan in the north, a Sunni Arab state in the centre, and a Shia state in the south. Central government would exercise relatively few powers - little more than foreign affairs and monetary policy.
For Kurdistan, federalism means continuing the democratic experiment started during the last 13 years of de facto independence from the rest of Iraq. The coalition should abandon efforts to disband the Kurdish peshmerga, who are an organised military that took more casualties in the war for Iraq's liberation than any other American ally.
The Kurdish people will never accept the return of an Iraqi army, however reformed, that they associate with decades of repression and genocide. Reintroducing central government institutions to Kurdistan will upset a part of Iraq that is so stable that fewer than 300 coalition troops are now stationed there.
Only the most fanatic nation builders among the Bush administration's neo-conservatives can think this makes sense. Assuming the Shia religious parties win the elections in the south, they should be allowed to establish their Islamic state - but only in the south. This may not be desirable, but the alternative is escalating conflict with radical Shia elements, and the possibility of civil war within the Shia community itself. The coalition might also think twice about trying to disarm the militia associated with more moderate clerics like al-Hakim, as Shia flock to join Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, which may now be Iraq's largest army.
The differences between Shia and Sunni Arabs are not as great as the gulf between Arabs and Kurds, and it may be possible for both to live in a single Arab state. The problem in the Sunni triangle is the absence of leaders with any constituency. A separate state is more likely to give the Sunni Arabs the security that will allow the emergence of a leadership sufficiently confident to take on the insurgency. Unfortunately there is no guarantee this will actually happen.
Federation will allow the coalition to disengage from the Kurdish north and the Shia south, and to focus on three problem areas: Baghdad, the Sunni triangle, and the contested city of Kirkuk.
More than ever, the US and Britain need an exit strategy from an Iraq engagement that is opposed by growing majorities in both countries and in Iraq. This strategy has to be based on a clear-eyed understanding of what Iraq is, and not fantasies about a country that never was.
Far from being the first step to Iraq's dissolution, federalism is the last chance to hold the country together. For Britain and the US, it is also a way out.
Peter W Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, is senior diplomatic fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.