Washington, predictably, hails Iraq constitution vote

By John Simpson
BBC world affairs editor
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I used to think the essence of good reporting lay in showing people that subjects they had always thought were too complicated to understand could in fact be explained simply and easily.

Now, though, I have changed my mind. Everyone, from the man beside you at the bar to the writers of newspaper editorials, seems to think there is an easy answer to everything.

I have come to realise that good reporting should show people that the big issues of the day are usually complicated, and require real thought; that simple, off-the-cuff answers - bring the troops home, smash the insurgents now, DO something - are often just the result of impatience and ignorance, not of understanding.

Take Saturday's referendum in Iraq.

In the old days in Iraq, the ludicrous results which Saddam Hussein routinely used to get for his referendums and elections were genuine enough in one sense: it was so dangerous to cast a vote against Saddam that almost everyone did exactly as they were told in the voting-booth.

And so, back in January, some Iraqi friends of mine wept with the sheer pleasure of being able to vote freely, for the first time in their entire lives. It was wonderful to see.

Unedifying wrangling

Yet if you look at the aftermath of the January election, and at the likely outcome of Saturday's constitutional referendum, it is clear they have made the fierce divisions within Iraq much deeper and more bitter than ever.

It is partly a numbers game. The Sunni minority, who always dominated Iraq, have been the embittered losers after the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Iraq's Shia majority, having been kept down by successive governments ever since the British arrived in 1920, are celebrating their new power in all sorts of ways.

Some Shia politicians want the introduction of full Islamic law - others, the right to withhold their oil income from the central areas of the country, where the Sunni Arabs predominate.

So when the British and US governments praise the courage of Iraqis for braving the threats of the extremists in order to vote, they are right.

But the business of forcing through an entire constitutional process in a matter of a couple of years, as though Iraq was a normal country with long democratic experience, has made everything far worse.

Sometimes, it seems, the least admired and respected figure in post-Saddam Iraq is L Paul Bremer, the US administrator who masterminded the constitutional process.

The constitution itself, the result of some often quite unedifying wrangling between Iraqi politicians, is disturbingly vague about several crucial questions.

One section says blandly that revenues will be shared between the federal government in Baghdad and the various provincial governments - how they will be shared is a matter for later discussion.

Everything, now as in January's election, depends on how many Sunni Arabs are prepared to support the new system. Back in January it was clear that very few were. And now? Well, we will see over the next few days.

Tough choices

One of the shrewdest and best-informed commentators on Iraq is Professor Juan Cole of Michigan University.

He believes a rejection of the constitution by Sunni Arabs en masse would seem to be "a guarantee of ongoing guerrilla warfare against the new order, and possibly a partition of the country".

Maybe the results this week will show they have not rejected it en masse. But this vote certainly will not be enough to put an end to the insurgency, and could actually turn out to make the divisions within Iraq worse and more bitter.

So let's not pretend there are nice, easy answers to a complicated problem like Iraq. If the coalition troops were pulled out quickly, the guerrilla warfare and the possible partition of the country which Professor Cole talks about would get much worse.

And if the coalition troops stay, then the kind of lasting anger caused by US operations in places like Falluja, and the recent British actions in Basra, will also get worse.

Politics is rarely about doing the one obvious right thing instead of the wrong one. It is usually a choice between various deeply unappetising alternatives.

No easy answers

Last week in this column I wrote about the problems of dealing with Iran, and suggested that the only effective way was to use firm, quiet pressure on its government.

That annoyed all sorts of people who believed that "something should be done". But what? No one ever quite says.

Invade Iran? Hardly. The US and British armies are the two best in the world, yet they have so far proved unable to hold back, let alone stop, an insurgency of between 30,000 and 50,000 mostly untrained civilians.

Bomb Iran? After the international difficulties the British and Americans have experienced after the invasion of Iraq, no one is even going to suggest that.

So what are we left with? Firm, quiet pressure is just about it. You might not find your taxi-driver suggesting it, or the man standing beside you in the pub, or all of the people who write in to the BBC News website.

But let's not pretend that difficult problems always have nice, easy answers. They do not.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4349248.stm