Stumble it!Shiites, Kurds forge ahead | csmonitor.com
posted in Politics, War by themaiden |The Christian Science Monitor has a piece about some goings on in Iraq. The Shiites and the Kurds are busy making a government…
The stakes of such meetings are enormous. While certainly the beginning of political horse-trading that will stretch over the coming weeks, the challenge will be to unite groups with widely different views into one ruling coalition. A consensus-based process could create a government stabilized through the buy-in of all Iraqis.
…but they are doing so without the Sunnis. This cannot be a good thing. As Jill Carroll, the article’s author and correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, points out, the Sunnis have by far the greatest influence among the insurgents and with talk like “We will have nothing left to do, only fighting…” it is pretty clear that all is not well.
The Sunnis are a minority in Iraq, but are used to being the privileged class, under Hussein’s rule, and are used to ruling the nation. This new government has largely stripped them of that power, and fair election or not, it is not sitting well with the Sunni arabs. There is really no way that Washington can control this, except by force, and– leaving aside the ethics of forcing another people to our will– we are leaving. Iraq certainly can’t control the fighting, and I rather doubt it will ever be able to do so.
I can’t really blame Bush directly for this result, but I can fault his idealogical idiocy in thinking that the US can force a democracy upon a region populated by three radically different peoples who have never, NEVER, identified as one country but were crammed together by the British for the purposes of western political gain.
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