Another Baghdad Miracle
A day after it snowed in Baghdad for the first time in 100 years, much to the delight of the locals, another equally improbable thing has been reported: real progress towards reconciliation by the Iraqi parliament.
Iraq’s parliament voted Saturday to give jobs back to thousands of former supporters of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party who were fired after the U.S. invasion in 2003.
The long-delayed bill is the first of several major changes in Iraqi law sought by the Bush administration with the goal of easing ethnic and religious tensions. The 275-seat parliament is still deadlocked over how to share the country’s oil profits, constitutional amendments demanded by minority Sunni Arabs, and a bill spelling out rules for local elections.
The oil-revenue plan in particular is far overdue, but this is a good start. De-Baathification was one of the many mistakes we made in the early days of the Iraq War. It should have applied only to those at the top with complicity in atrocities, and not the grunts who filled most of the party slots. This legislation should help ease some of the lingering Sunni resentment over the huge loss of jobs that accompanied the policy and open some of those old jobs back up to people who might otherwise be unemployable and drift towards radicalism…
I’ve heard that de facto oil revenue sharing is now going on.
So what’s the count now? 10 (benchmarks reached) down and 8 more to go? Certainly more “successful” than Breck Boy’s “2 (losses) down and 48 to go”.
Did it give you any pause to note that this bill was actively supported by the Sadrists, and opposed by most of the Sunni parties in Parliament (whom, one might have thought, it was intented to mollify)?
You know I’ve had my beefs with Juan Cole in the past, but he seems to be spot on about this one. [See, also, the LA Times.]
I hate say it, but it seems that, when it comes to “good news from Iraq,” there’s a sucker born every minute.
Umm, maybe I’m missing something.
There are 275 Representatives consisting of the spectrum of Kurds, Shia & Sunnis as well as from fundamentalists to independents/secularists. When ratified, the bill would retire & pension all of the senior echelon and reinstate the lowers. Sounds like no Baathist will be left out unless they are criminals.
MSM says:
Juan says:
So which is it and does it matter? Or do we move the goalpost again and say it’s no good unless it’s unanimous from all 275 Representatives?
As long as it’s ratified, it’s just another benchmark to check off on the to-do list. Heck, isn’t that how our Congress works, majority rule, horse-trading and all that jazz?