....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-independent 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. Thisironically, 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 fundamentally in order to break up ethnicity as the country’s core organizing concept......
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