Evolving in Iraq

THIS WEEK'S last-minute agreement on amending Iraq's constitution is a desperate but necessary attempt to compensate for a succession of avoidable blunders.

Most blatant was the Bush administration's insistence on a rigid deadline for the difficult process of drafting a constitution. The stakes were always too high to make meeting an arbitrary deadline more important than forging a consensus among Sunni Arabs, Kurds, and Shi'ites.

No less a miscalculation was the decision of Sunni Arab leaders to boycott the parliamentary elections held last January. The boycott disempowered Sunni Arabs, fostered precisely the sectarian fragmenting of Iraq that Sunni Arabs commonly say they wish to avoid, and allowed Kurds and Shi'ites to dominate the commission that drafted the constitution which is to be submitted to a popular referendum this Saturday.

Even so, the Kurds and Shi'ites who drafted the constitution blundered by including elements sure to antagonize many Sunni Arabs. Happily, one of these elements has already been altered. That is the blanket purging of former Ba'ath Party members from responsible posts in government, schools, and other sensitive jobs. Under the revised version of the constitution, only Ba'athists guilty of participating in Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaigns and crimes against humanity are to be banned from their previous careers.

Two other crucial Sunni Arab objections will be addressed by a commission appointed by the parliament to be elected Dec. 15: the sharing of revenue from Iraq's natural resources and the future balance between regional autonomy and the central government. Since Sunni Arab leaders are calling on their followers to vote in the December elections, they should be in a position to secure Sunni interests in the commission chosen to revise the current draft of the constitution.

If significant numbers of Sunni Arabs do withstand the violent intimidation of Ba'athist and Islamist terrorists seeking to prevent Iraqis from voting Saturday, they may discover that it is in their interest to approve a loose federal structure for Iraq in which they can govern themselves in the four primarily Sunni Arab provinces. An acceptance of regional autonomy is conceivable, however, only if the benefits of Iraq's oil, water, and natural gas are shared equally by all Iraqis regardless of their ethnic or sectarian background.

Even before needed amendments are included, many of the articles in the current draft of the constitution reflect a yearning for pluralism, the rule of law, and human rights that betokens a heartening break not only with Iraq's despotic past but also with the police state autocracies of most of Iraq's neighbors.