WASHINGTON: Senior US officials have begun to question a key presumption of American strategy in Iraq: that establishing democracy there can erode and ultimately eradicate the insurgency gripping the country. The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration’s approach to rebuilding Iraq as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course.

But within the last two months, US analysts with access to classified intelligence data have started to challenge this precept, noting a “significant and disturbing disconnect” between apparent advances on the political front and any progress in reducing insurgent attacks. Now, with next Saturday’s constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the Bush administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgents.

The commander of US forces in Iraq, Army Gen. George W. Casey, has acknowledged that such a scenario is possible, while officials elsewhere in the administration, all of whom declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said they shared similar concerns about the referendum. Iraq’s Sunnis, who form the core of the insurgency, are bitterly opposed to a constitution drafted mainly by the country’s majority Shia sect and ethnic Kurds. Yet from all indications, they will fail to muster enough votes to defeat it.

“It could make people on the fence a little more angry or [make them] come off the fence,” said a senior US official who requested anonymity. A growing number of experts outside the administration and in Iraq agree with such assessments. “If the constitution passes in a non-amicable way, the violence will increase,” said Ali Dabagh, an Iraqi National Assembly member who is believed to be close to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. The White House has consistently linked the building of democracy in Iraq and the broader Middle East with the defeat of the insurgency there.

President Bush repeated that assertion in his recent major policy address to the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. “If the peoples of [the Middle East] are permitted to choose their own destiny and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women,” he declared, “then the extremists will be marginalized and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow and eventually end.” Vice President Dick Cheney has put it more succinctly. “I think ... we will, in fact, succeed in getting democracy established in Iraq, and I think when we do, that will be the end of the insurgency,” he told CNN in June.

Those comments echoed a belief put forward earlier by the Pentagon, which asserted that US forces could not defeat the insurgency through military might alone but that success required redeploying troops to protect the nascent democratic process. That process, commanders said, together with military force, would eventually smother rebel violence.

Despite what Bush on Thursday called “incredible political progress” in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s fall 2 1/2 years ago, the Iraqi insurgency has grown in strength and sophistication. From about 5,000 Saddam’s loyalists using leftover Iraqi army equipment in late 2003, it has mushroomed into a potent force of up to 20,000 quipped with explosives capable of knocking out even heavily armoured military vehicles. “The surface political process has stumbled forward, but the insurgency came up and kind of stayed that way,” said a US government analyst with access to classified intelligence. Several analysts, who spoke on condition of anonymity while discussing intelligence, indicated that initial evidence of the disconnect began to surface in the spring — after Iraq’s first national elections on Jan. 30 — and it has gradually become clearer since.

Doubts about such a central pillar of Iraq policy come at an awkward time for the White House: Opinion polls show eroding public confidence in Bush as a leader and in his management of the war. In recent days, Bush, Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have tried to shore up public support for staying in Iraq.

But Middle East experts say they have found little correlation between Iraq’s emerging democracy and the strength of the rebellion.

“The democratic process as it has worked so far has certainly done nothing to undermine the insurgency,” said Nathan Brown, who researches Middle East political reform at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Robert Malley, who co-wrote a September report by the International Crisis Group concluding that approval of the constitution could make things worse, called the administration’s Iraq policy “a case study of pinning too much hope on an electoral process without doing so much of the other work.” Success in Iraq “is not about democracy or non-democracy; it’s about reaching consensus on a political pact that all parties agree to,” said Malley, a former adviser to President Clinton on Arab-Israeli affairs. “If they don’t agree, the political process won’t help.” US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad is reportedly trying to broker 11th-hour changes in the draft to ease Sunni concerns, but even if he succeeds, the effect of such concessions would not be immediately clear, analysts said.

A Western diplomat in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity said a government that is unable to provide for basic needs such as security, electricity, potable water and jobs commands little loyalty. Brian Jenkins, a terrorism specialist at the RAND Corp. think-tank in Santa Monica, said that a cursory look at history shows “there is no guarantee that political progress diminishes political violence.” He cited Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Northern Ireland as places where insurgencies have survived for decades in functioning democracies with educated populations.

He said those militant movements were driven by various factors, including the aspirations of aggrieved groups, criminal profit-seeking and a lack of economic development. Jenkins and others believe that Iraq’s insurgency has already developed several motivating strands that would probably sustain it for years. With the divisive constitutional referendum only a week away, the first Saddam trial scheduled to begin this month and the prospect that the December election will produce a Shia-dominated parliament, upcoming events may only further distance Sunnis, who form 20 per cent of country’s population, from Iraq’s emerging democratic state, analysts say.

Sunnis, largely excluded from this summer’s crucial negotiations on the constitution, see the draft as rigged against their interests. They fear, for example, that blunt language outlawing Saddam’s Baath Party could be used to block public-sector employment for their sect. The draft also appears to open the door to such a loosely federated system that it could deprive Sunni regions of the benefits of the country’s huge oil reserves. Some Iraqis accuse the Bush administration of sacrificing a unifying political process in favour of speed and arbitrary deadlines needed to sustain US public support for the war and justify politically important military draw-downs.

“We’re short of time — it’s the fault of the Americans,” Kurdish politician Mahmoud Othman said. “They are always insisting on short deadlines. It’s as if they’re [making] hamburgers and fast food.” Othman added: “If we’d had more time, it would have been possible to get Sunni participation. When Oct. 15 comes, many won’t even have seen the constitution.”

—Dawn/LAT News Service