The Foreign Service Journal, March 2008

have broken down the confessional groupings and forced political par- ticipation and accountability through provincial identification. We should not perpetuate the fiction that there are military, regional or economic solutions to a problem that is fundamentally one of internal Iraqi political structure and identification. Nor should we assume that an Iraq consisting of a Shiite-dominated core with a semi-inde- pendent Kurdistan and a marginalized Sunnistan will eventually be stable. The current political program for Iraq is to attempt to garner concessions from the Shiite government on behalf of Sunnis. The very nature of this process perpetuates and hardens the ethnic divisions that are at the heart of the dysfunction in the Iraqi state. The only viable prospect for a unified and stable Iraq at present is to change the political framework so that the basic organizing principle is 18-state federalism. This, ironically, is where Amb. Bremer was headed with his caucus system in the fall of 2003, before the plan was aborted. It is not clear whether it would have worked then, but it is doubtful that anything else will work now. The structure of the Iraqi state must change fundamen- tally in order to break up ethnicity as the country’s core organizing concept. A federation will not emerge as the result of a 10-step program. The process will be messy and circuitous, and there will be innumerable diversions along the way. It starts with clarity about the current state of the country, which is this: Although it maintains the fiction of 18 administrative units, Iraq is increasingly a federation organized around its three confessional groupings. Even when acting locally, Iraqis generally do so along sectari- an lines. The provinces as political units have simply never taken off in post-Saddam Iraq. But it should also F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 25 The provinces as political units have simply never taken off in post-Saddam Iraq.