Iraq Elections A Success. Iraq Peace Still Up In The Air
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, The War On Terrorism, WarThis editorial in the NY Times gets it right. The election itself was a success, but a Parliament that’s truly representative of the nation is needed to make sure Iraq has many more of these successful elections.
It is likely to be days, perhaps weeks, before all the votes are counted and the precise shape of the new Parliament is known. One crucial question will be how the majority Shiites have divided their votes between the Iranian-backed religious parties, which are now dominant, and their more secular and nationalist competitors.It will then be up to the leading Shiite parties to make alliances with Kurdish, Sunni and pan-Iraqi groups to form a working parliamentary majority. The best result would be a broad but coherent alliance. A central government that was weak and paralyzed would be in nobody’s interests.
Besides forming a government, the new Parliament is pledged to choose a committee to rewrite the brand-new but fatally flawed Constitution, which was drafted only this summer and ratified in a referendum just two months ago. As it now stands, the Constitution is an open invitation for a breakup of Iraq and for years of bloody civil and regional war.
Under sharp prodding from Washington, the Shiite and Kurdish politicians who came up with this disastrous document agreed that it could be quickly revised after the parliamentary election. At a minimum, the committee needs to create a much stronger central government, to allocate oil revenues fairly to all regions, and to protect civil rights and women’s rights from clerical encroachment.
Yes, the rewriting of their constitution is vital to the long term success of Iraq. But I think (and truly hope) these politicans will wake up and see that at it’s very core the document that will propel their democracy has to be inclusive. And we also see here another call for distributing oil revenues from a central point to all regions, instead of each region being responsible for doing their own deals. It all leads back to the oil people, and if Iraq can’t get their act together about that, then the nation is just begging for massive unrest and quite possibly civil war.
And as, always, compromise is key:
The faith and courage of Iraq’s voters produced a successful Election Day. To create a functioning, stable and democratic Iraq, Iraqis must now depend on their elected politicians’ vision, statesmanship and willingness to compromise.
Well said.
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2005 and is filed under Elections, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 19th, 2005 at 4:53 pm
Personally I think most “negotiations” that occur will be in the form of assassinations. I expect within the first month after the results are announced at least one, and possibly several Iraqis officials will be dead, and it will escalate from there.
I believe the end result (after many more deaths, civil war for years (or decades), and innumerable intractable arguments about points of Sharia law) will be 3 separate states, possibly with some loose political connections between them. Which is probably where they should have headed from the start. These are not people who can rationally set aside their fundamentalist beliefs and agree to disagree.
Yes, I’m one of those people who think Howard Dean was right when he said victory in Iraq is not possible.