Handpicking Iraq's interim leadership to reflect its ethnic and religious makeup seemed like the right thing to do six months ago. But communal tensions are on the rise, deepening the country's ethnic and religious fault lines and casting doubt on prospects for installing a peacefully elected government next year.
While Iraqis revel in their newfound freedoms to speak, worship, publish and broadcast as they please, their future as a unified state is being tested by rivalries among Sunni Muslims, Shiites and Kurds jockeying for power after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Cobbled together by colonial Britain less than a century ago, Iraq has struggled for years with ethnic and religious rivalries. The prospect of national dismemberment may seem remote, but that possibility has been enough for Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey to warn publicly against steps which might lead to the division of this nation of 25 million.
Clashes between majority Shiites and minority Sunnis are not uncommon. On Dec. 9, a Sunni mosque was bombed in Baghdad, killing three people. On Friday, a car bomb killed five people outside a Shiite mosque in Baqouba, a mixed Sunni-Shiite city in a mostly Sunni region.
Attacks on the offices of Kurdish political parties also are increasing, as is squabbling among members of the Governing Council — the Iraqi interim administration of 13 Shiites, five Sunni Arabs, five Kurds, one ethnic Turk and one Christian — over whether to adopt a federal system in which the Kurds would retain the substantial self-rule they have enjoyed in their northern provinces since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraqi politicians routinely explain away their differences as part of the country's newfound democracy and assure Iraqis that only dialogue, rather than violence, would be used to settle differences.
They accuse hard-liners and the media, especially Arab satellite news channels such as Al-Jazeera, of fomenting strife.
"There is no such thing as a 'representative' of Sunni Arabs," said Samir Shakir Mahmoud, a Sunni, when asked about his role on the Governing Council.
"I consider myself an Iraqi citizen first ... and I try to serve Iraqis, all Iraqis — Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Kurds and others," he said in a newspaper interview this week.
But for Sunnis, the prospect of minority status in a future, Shiite-dominated government is unsettling, given their long ascendancy under the British and then under Saddam.
Many Sunnis accuse the Americans of fanning sectarianism as part of a divide-and-rule policy. They complain that the Americans are paying excessive attention to the views of senior Shiite clerics on the political process, which is designed to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis by July 1 and put a democratically elected government in place by the end of 2005.
On the other hand, when it comes to resisting Kurdish autonomy demands, Sunni and Shiite Arabs on the council are united.
The patchwork face of post-Saddam Iraq is on vivid display. Iraqi TV broadcasts of the five daily Muslim calls for prayer include both the Sunni and Shiite versions. The Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday in November was observed on three different days to accommodate all faiths, and the Governing Council runs three religious affairs departments — one for Shiites, one for Sunnis and one for non-Muslims.
Fair enough, an ecumenical-minded outsider might conclude. Wrong, argue many Iraqis, mostly Sunnis but also some secular-minded Shiites, who see the seeds of secession in the new Iraq.
"The sectarian and religious approach to politics in Iraq is very dangerous," warned Fahmi Howeidi, a prominent Islamic writer from Egypt who closely monitors religious issues in the Arab world. "It has created a divide that will be difficult to mend or reverse in the future."
Abdel-Satar al-Jinabi, a Sunni cleric, denies widely cited estimates that say Shiites make up 60 percent of the population.
"The Shiite claim that they are the majority is false," he said.
In a sermon at a Baghdad mosque Friday, al-Jinabi said, "It is horrific crime to oppress and marginalize the Sunnis."
Nevertheless, political sectarian roots extend back to the days when Ottoman rulers, themselves Sunnis, granted rights and status based on one's religion or ethnicity.
The British continued to favor Iraq's Sunnis, a practice continued by Saddam, who ruthlessly suppressed Shiite and Kurdish resistance.
Now, for the first time in the modern era, Iraqis are free to speak out and form political parties. The long-oppressed Shiites and Kurds have been empowered and the Sunnis have lost their privileged status.
"I think what is happening in Iraq is natural," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurd on the Governing Council. "Saddam ruled Iraq for 35 years as a dictator — no parties, no freedoms. Now we have new problems and conflicting views but at least we are free."