Stay in Iraq or go? Answer will soon become clear

UMM QASR, Iraq — Even a brief visit to this southern Iraq port leaves me convinced that we are entering the endgame here. The coming Iraqi votes, in October over the new constitution and in December over a new Parliament, are going to tell America whether it is worth staying here or not for much longer.

Despite all the shameful blunders of Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq, at the end of the day, was always going to be what the Iraqis decided to make of it. And the Iraqi majority — the Shiites and Kurds who make up roughly 80 percent of this country — have spoken. They want an Iraq that will be decentralized and will allow each of their communities to run its own affairs and culture — without fear of ever again being dominated and brutalized by an oil-backed Sunni minority regime in Baghdad.

Equally important, both the Kurds and the Shiites have made it clear that they have no interest in telling the Sunnis how to live, and will cut them a slice of Iraq's oil revenue and maintain Iraq's basic Arab identity.

So now we know what kind of majority the Kurds and Shiites want to be, the question is what kind of minority the Iraqi Sunnis want to be. Do they want to be the Palestinians and spend the next 100 years trying to mobilize the Arab-Muslim world to reverse history and restore their "right" to rule Iraq as a minority — a move that would destroy them and Iraq.

Or do they want to embrace the future? I know the Sunnis are terrified by Iran's influence in this southern region, but as the Brits who run the Basra area, which includes this port city of Umm Qasr, will tell you, the Iraqi Arab Shiites here are obsessed with not being dominated by Iran. Despite growing cultural and commercial ties with Iran, they are Iraqis first. That attitude would only be enhanced if Iraqi Sunnis, rather than allowing or abetting the murders of Shiites, would instead embrace the new constitution and let the U.S. cut the Sunnis an even fairer slice of the pie.

"We have a lot of overlapping interests with the Sunnis of Iraq," a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said. Indeed, in the latter stages of the constitutional negotiations in Iraq, the talented U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, was basically acting as the Sunnis' lawyer in dealings with the Kurds and Shiites. The problem was that the Sunnis never knew when to say yes, "that's enough," and the United States got fed up with their demanding much more than their due.