A Sign of Civil War, Or Much Ado About Nothing?
Shiite and Kurdish factions in Iraq are basically throwing in the towel on getting Sunni agreement on a draft constitution, and from this distance, it’s hard to tell what to make of it. Predictably, the New York Times is spinning it as a huge blow to Bush, and perhaps it is, as clearly the administration wanted Sunni buy-in to enhance the prospects for stability and troop withdrawals:
The decision to move forward was a heavy blow for the Bush administration, which had expended enormous energy and political capital to forge a constitution that included the Sunnis. On Thursday, in a last-ditch effort to get a deal, President Bush telephoned Abdul Aziz Hakim, a cleric and the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, to press him to offer a more palatable compromise to the Sunnis.
The Sunni leaders complained bitterly that the Shiites and the Kurds had offered no real concessions on the two issues that still divided them: autonomy for the Shiite majority and an end to the campaign to root out former Baath Party members from government and society.
The Washington Post‘s report is not so gloomy:
Abdul Nasser Janabi, another Sunni on the committee, said: “There are many disputes that we cannot agree on. Some of their suggestions are positive, like to delay of the issue of federalism. . . . We want this issue to be postponed as a whole, but they want to postpone it in a way that guarantees it in the constitution.”
Despite the dissenting voices, Kurdish and Shiite leaders said as broad an agreement as possible had been reached and largely dismissed the objections of Sunnis who they said did not truly represent their communities.
“I think for all intents and purposes we have a deal. We have a draft that cannot be improved upon,” said Planning Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd. “No one could be entirely happy with what we have, but while some are opposed, many Sunnis expressed happiness.”
On this one, we’ll just have to wait and see, I’m afraid…
Mark–Not to sound like a broken record, but yesterday’s WSJ had what I thought was the calmest and most matter-of-fact wrap on the Iraqi constitution.
I’d recommend that anyone who wants to know what’s going on with the document and the process surrounding its creation should read this 900-word editorial.
Here’s the link.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007157
Greg, as always, thanks for the tip; the only downside I can see to this information age we live in is there just isn’t enough time to see all the stories we should see, so I always appreciate the pointers…
Mark, i read somewhere that another sticky point for the sunnis, and if true understandably so, is that the constitution talks about the distribution for oil revenues only for existing wells. Given that most of the oil seems to be in northern and southern iraq, if the trend continued the sunnis would feel further alienated. Have you also seen/heard of this point?
algiga, this, I had not heard; quite interesting, if true…