Solving Iraq’s constitutional problems: the hard way

Gary Anderson writes in the Small Wars Journal:

The armed forces of the Caliphate, formerly known as ISIS, have finally resolved most of the issues left unresolved when the Iraqis wrote their constitution in 2005. A public administration professor told a class I was attending that; “if you don’t run your country, someone will. Nuri al-Maliki just found that out the hard way.

In 2005, I ran a simulation of the constitutional convention for the JCS as part of my work on a DOD Red Teaming contract. The purpose of the simulation was to attempt to identify the issues that would derive from the actual convention which was scheduled to occur the following month. We put together teams of Iraqi expatriates which represented the major ethnic and sectarian factions in Iraq. The three teams represented the major factions; Sunni, Shiite, and Kurds. We broke the Shiite group into two sub teams. We asked one Shiite group to take the position of the moderates who ran the existing provisional government, and another to take the pro-Iranian hard line of clergy such as Muqtada Sadr. The United States had put the proverbial gun to the Iraqis’ heads and gave them a time limit to come up with something resembling a constitution, so we gave our players one as well. Our Iraqis had three days to produce a product.