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Ehud Ya'ari: Not So Fast

There�s a growing rumble from among the American officials in Iraq and from the ranks of the U.S. army demanding to cut losses and to start packing up

It's very tempting to start preparing the eulogy for the American experiment in Iraq, as if it were terminally ill. Indeed, the situation seems beyond repair. American post-war strategy, or whatever�s left of its visionary plans, simply doesn�t work. Victories over insurgents in local skirmishes will not necessarily avert colossal defeat.

The U.N. can�t or won�t take on the burden of establishing a new state, and the attempt to hide behind the narrow back of Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy, will not extricate the administration from the bleak reality on the ground. There are no strong local forces ready to do so: not militarily, nor, even worse, politically.

The administration set up by Ambassador Paul Bremer just doesn�t function. A hooligan such as rebel militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who is shunned by the vast majority of the Shi�ites, has managed to catapult himself into a position of real threat. The hasty recruitment of generals who served Saddam until they chose to abandon him, and their appointment to key roles in Falluja and other cities, will not serve as a model for the central government.

It�s no wonder, then, that there is a growing rumble from among the American officials in Iraq and from the ranks of the U.S. army demanding to cut losses, to find an objective that can be presented quickly as a pretext to declare victory and to start packing up. The uproar over the revelations of brutality against prisoners makes things even more urgent.

A decision to pull out now, however, would constitute a major setback not just for President Bush, but for the United States as a whole; its price could end up being several times higher than the cost of digging in and staying the course. The Iranians, for example, are not convinced that the American "disengagement" scenario will indeed play out, so they are waiting in the wings. More accurately, they are building up their influence and accumulating power bases inside Iraq, but they are very cautious not to be perceived as the ones working to bring down the Americans. They will be happy to reap the fruits of a retreat, and are already in position to do so, but they will not dare shake the tree.

The truth is that Iraq can exist as a political entity, but only on the basis of a democratic federal system. As Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recently put it, Iraq will never break any Olympic records in standards of freedoms and good governance, but it will keep on progressing toward an open, pluralistic regime that will be more attentive than ever before to the needs of its population. The Iraqis know that too: Without a Shi�ite-Kurdish understanding and cooperation between these two communities, Iraq will break up into ethnic principalities. The Kurds will carry on striving to extend their control southwards to oil-rich Kirkuk and Hanaqin and will embroil themselves in Mosul, to the west. The Sunnis will group together to defend the "Iron triangle" around the Ramadi Corridor, and will rely on Syria for help. And the Shi�ites will divide their support between local strongmen and clerics while Iran cultivates its proteges.

That�s the reason why, despite the pain, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The Shi�ites - and certainly the influential Ayatollah Sistani and his colleagues - don�t want an Iranian client-state in southern Iraq. The Kurds want autonomy but are fearful of making a break for independence, lest they end up with Turkey as their master. The Sunnis are scared of being shut out of the oil revenues from the south and the north alike. Other than Al-Qaeda and its offshoots and the hard-core Ba�ath loyalists, Iraqis in general are not enthusiastic about getting rid of the American presence.

Therefore, the more decisive and comprehensive the June 30 handover of authority to a temporary Iraqi government will be, the better. So far we have seen too many attempts to dictate arrangements and solutions courtesy of Uncle Sam, instead of giving the internal Iraqi dynamic a chance to find its own way. The Iraqis know how to speak to one another, know who their own rivals are and are quite capable of finding a formula for living together through consensus and debate.

True, this would lead to a completely different Iraq from the one meant to serve as a shining example for the rest of the Arab world. But even an Iraq in which the regional forces are stronger than the central government in Baghdad, and in which the militias overshadow the army, even an Iraq such as this is preferable to Iraq under Saddam, or some would-be Saddam copy in the future.

To achieve this, the Americans should distance themselves from the political bargaining and concentrate only on fighting the terror organizations and on the task of economic rehabilitation. They should suffer in silence local leaders who won�t applaud Washington, and continue deterring the Iranians and others like them. The route forward passes between the Shi�ites who listen to Sistani and the intellectuals around Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leader Jalal Talabani. They will know with whom to deal among the Sunnis, and about what.