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Saddam Hussein’s execution is a pivotal event, one which calls for a

re-evaluation of the positive consequences of the American-led invasion of Iraq, as well as our present strategy of attempting to rebuild Iraq.

The U.S. has achieved several crucial accomplishments in this war, primarily the liberation of millions of people, which are downplayed in the pessimistic media environment as most reports focus on the ongoing sectarian violence.

The current violence, though, requires that we consider a more comprehensive political solution than simply deciding whether to increase or decrease the number of U.S. troops. Rather than establishing a single democracy which forces bitterly warring sects together, it should instead consider more of a loose confederation with autonomy for each group.

Within hours of Hussein’s execution – a seemingly key positive event – media outlets reported that the event could serve to increase violence, something that has yet to be clearly manifest.

But the same reporters have been spreading these claims for some time, playing up reports that the removal of Hussein’s regime and the continued American presence destabilizes the region into open violence. Some even suggest that Iraq was more peaceful under Hussein’s brutal regime.

Yet thousands died in the mass graves of Hussein’s brutal regime, including 5,000 Kurdish villagers killed in a single 1988 attack. Some accounts put the total number murdered under Hussein’s regime at more than 200,000.

For comparison, IraqBodyCount.org

puts the number of Iraqis killed since the U.S. invasion between 53,000 and 59,000, and even that number may be inflated due to its heavy reliance on unofficial eyewitness accounts.

Hussein’s government-sanctioned killings have been decisively put to an end. Many of his murders occurred under a brutally enforced veil of secrecy in which his opponents simply disappeared.

The situation is far more positive than media reports let on; there is no question that Iraq is far better off than it was under Hussein.

There is the lower death toll achieved by removing a tyrant who massacred his own people and who invaded Kuwait. The U.S. eliminated an exporter of terror – Hussein harbored terrorists and funded suicide attacks in Israel. In addition, Iraqis now enjoy priceless freedoms, as well as healthy economic growth, which the Global Insight firm estimates had a gross domestic product growth rate of 17 percent for 2005.

Despite these successes, the ongoing violence suggests that it may very well be time to dismantle another part of Hussein’s legacy.

The dictator held the country together by violence. Under Hussein’s regime, the Sunni Muslim minority dominated the Shiite majority (making up around one-third and two-thirds of the population, respectively).

Iraq as a nation is largely a fabrication. The British captured the territory from the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and the League of Nations created Iraq’s borders when it declared Iraq a mandate in 1920. These borders lumped together several groups, including religiously distinct Shiites and Sunnis, and ethnically different Kurds and Arabs, with little common identity.

Decades of tyrants, culminating in Hussein, held the various groups together through oppression, putting down multiple separatist uprisings.

The overthrow of Hussein’s regime merely forced the Iraqis to openly address a fundamental conflict that had never been resolved, a conflict now categorized by many as a full-blown civil war. Hussein’s regime effectively carried out a civil war, evidenced by the large number of Iraqis the tyrant killed. The bloodshed was just more one-sided than today’s conflict.

The new Iraqi constitution already contains some amount of power-sharing, including a guarantee of representation for different groups from different areas of the country.

But, in light of ongoing violence, rather than continuing to forge a country from such fundamentally different groups such as Sunnis and Shiites, the U.S. should look into creating a confederacy in which each of the sects would be largely autonomous.

This may mitigate the violence which claims the lives of Iraqis and American troops. This violence results from a Shiite backlash against the Sunnis, who benefited from Hussein’s brutal regime, as well as a Sunni reaction to their loss of power.

There is some precedent for such a system of representation based on consensus between self-governing regions. Termed consociational democracy by political scientists, the system seeks to resolve struggles for control between ethnic groups within a country, according to Michael Thies, assistant professor of political science at UCLA. He mentioned Belgium, Switzerland and Lebanon as possible examples of the strategy’s success.

The fact that the control over oil is at the center of disputes lends itself to a relatively easy compromise. According to Thies, “Oil is a resource that is sold for money, which can be distributed easily, since it is infinitely divisible.”

Establishing a system of this sort would not be admitting defeat, but it would be acknowledging past errors – which the U.S. did not commit – in the creation and brutal enforcement of the borders of a country which only really existed on paper.

Lasting peace would then be within reach because, as the cliche goes, good fences make good neighbors.

If you want to play a rousing round of Risk with Lazar, e-mail him at dlazar@media.ucla.edu.