Is the Transition Plan in Iraq Encouraging Chaos?

Hi all, I'm downloading journal articles again...and with a dial up modem (I know I know) it can take a while.

I recently saw an interview with historian Nial Ferguson (currently at NYU soon to be at Harvard) on CSPAN. He made a remarkably good point with regard to American administration in Iraq and Iraqi resistance to it. The gist of his point was that as soon as the Americans set a deadline of June 30th for the provisional Iraqi governing council, any incentive for Iraqis to cooperate with it went out the window. Why cooperate with an entity that you know is going to end at a particular date? They won't be around to follow through on any agreements you make with them.

In short, he is saying that the reason Al Sadr, Sistani and various Sunni leaders seem more interested in establishing their political positions relative to each other (Al Sadr is accused assassinating at least one rival; a number of Shia mosques have been bombed etc) than they are in making deals with the US backed Governing Council is that by setting a fixed time frame for the Council the US authorities made it impotent from the start. Ferguson did not speculate as to whether this was intentional or not.

I'll extend Ferguson's argument here and suggest that by setting similar deadlines for the Transitional government which will take over after June 30th the American authorities have hamstrung that entity as well. What's more, the American authorities have required that anyone who participates in the transitional government promise not to run for office in the first elections (I believe this is the case, can anyone confirm this?). This means that aside from the deadline it will be known in advance that the individual leaders in the post June 30th transitional government will not be around to follow through on any deals they make with other Iraqis. It precludes the possibility that a shrewd Iraqi politician could parlay participation in the transitional government into a base from which to build a coalition to run the country after the first elections.

There are reasons to think that precluding transitional authorities from running for election is a good idea. The intent is probably to ensure their objectivity. However, by establishing a firm, fixed and known deadline for participation at each stage of the transition, the American authorities are almost assuring that no Iraqi leaders will have any incentive to cooperate with each other or the Americans themselves.

The result is that I'm now convinced that under the Bush plan for the transition, we will see minimal improvement in terms of peaceful cooperation among the Iraqis. The Bush plan is recipe for continued factionalization and perceptions by Iraqis (particularly the Sunnis) to believe that Iraqi politics is a zero-sum game where any gain for the other guy is a loss for them.

I can provide a more detailed explanation for why fixed time frames result in no cooperation on demand.

Comments anyone?