Trouble In Iraq?
Whether this is the typical whining of the losing party (think of the followers of Al Gore and John Kerry) or a more serious reaction is hard to gauge at this point, as the concept of democracy is still so new in Iraq, but the Sunnis are raising quite a ruckus over preliminary results of the recent election that show them running far behind the religious Shiites.
Reporting from those in Iraq and in the Iraqi expatriate communities worldwide is not optimistic; accusations of fraud are rampant. Much of this was and is to be expected; it is nevertheless quite unwelcome.
Forget partisanship, this is not a Republican or Democratic issue; it would be a huge setback for our cause if the newfound willingness of Sunnis to participate in the government were to dissolve in a cloud of acrimony. Let’s hope the news improves…
In retrospect, I remember hearing some comment from a Sunni voter on the radio, in which he said something to the effect that “we’ll show those Shiites that we are in the majority” which struck me at the time as odd, but not particularly important.
Sunnis make up 20% of the population, and early estimates suggest the Sunni Arab party (Iraqi Accordance Front) took in 19% of the vote. It’s hard to understand how anyone could have expected them to receive much more support than that, much less see it as a sign of massive fraud.
The real problem (from the same AP-via-yahoo article I just cited) seems to be this:
That kind of inability to agree on the basic facts on the ground is extremely dangerous — it’s understandable why Saddam would have been trumpeting this made-up fact for the last few decades (and working assiduously to make it come true) but the Sunnis need to come to grips with their actual numbers now.
Clint, yeah, Juan (shudder) Cole had something about some Iraqi Sunni saying they were in the majority, too – he might have been quoting the same story you saw…