If Iraq is to survive, the Sunnis must get their share of the oil revenue.

It's time to think about breaking up Iraq—not into three separate states (Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd) but possibly into semiautonomous federal districts.

I criticized this notion last May after Peter Galbraith proposed such a plan in the New York Review of Books. I complained that it could turn Iraq into a weak state, sire civil war, and lure neighboring countries to intervene, potentially inflaming the entire region. I still fear this possibility. The problem is, Iraq seems headed toward the same nightmare under the status quo. A new political structure might better contain the chaos than blithely muddling through.

Galbraith's idea was based on the premise that Iraq has always been an artifice—the product of lines drawn on a map by British imperialists in the wake of World War I—so why not erase the blunder and revert to traditional ethnic and tribal boundaries?

In his latest online Newsweek column, Christopher Dickey reports that Iraq's national security adviser, Moweffak al-Rubaie, is floating a similar plan, called "democratic regionalism." This would split the country into between four and six districts—the Sunni triangle, the Kurdish territories in the north, at least two Shiite areas in the south, and an administrative center in Baghdad.

Dickey differs from Galbraith in that he recognizes a crucial element in this vision: that the Sunnis must get a piece of Iraq's oil wealth. With a simple tripartite federation, the Kurds would get Kirkuk, the Shiites would have Basra and Nasiriyah—all oil-rich territories—but the Sunnis would be left with nothing. Under Rubaie's plan, the main function of the central government in Baghdad would be to distribute the revenue in some equitable fashion.

To a large extent, this is what the insurgency in the Sunni triangle is about: the Sunnis' sense of impending powerlessness and impoverishment. Sunnis make up just 20 percent of the Iraqi population. In the government to be elected this January (if elections take place), they will be in the minority; the Shiites will have majority rule. This (and not just the recent offensive in Fallujah) is why the leading Sunni parties are threatening to boycott the election.

The Bush administration has made many mistakes in its occupation policy, but one of the biggest was its failure to devise a Sunni strategy—a formula that would give the Sunnis some stake in a new Iraqi order.

The failure had a number of roots. Saddam Hussein was Sunni and lavished favors on his own kind. During the 1991 Gulf War, the first President Bush encouraged Shiites to rebel against Saddam, then allowed them to be slaughtered by Saddam's Sunni soldiers in the war's aftermath. Clearly some payback was in order. But the obligation was pushed beyond reason by the Pentagon's ill-fated backing of Shiite exile Ahmad Chalabi as leader of the new Iraq. Chalabi turned out to be fanatically anti-Sunni and reinforced the Bush administration's leanings in that direction.

This is not to say that the Sunnis now deserve special treatment, but they do need some benefits if Iraq is to avoid spiraling deeper into chaos.

Iraq's current political course holds little hope. If the major Sunni parties boycott the coming election, the new government would have no legitimacy in the least stable part of the country. If the elections do come off and Shiites hold a strong majority in the new government, many clerics will press for the adoption of Islamic law—and there's no way the Kurds will go along. In fact, the Kurds are unlikely to stand for any substantial erosion of the autonomy they've enjoyed for over a decade thanks to U.S. air patrols. In other words, elections or no, Iraq will be subjected to massive centrifugal forces.