After a day of "hope" from
realists and
morons, reality
bites:
A powerful Sunni organization urged Iraqi voters today to reject the country's new constitution in Saturday's nationwide referendum, one day after lawmakers approved a deal intended to overcome Sunni objections to the draft charter. The continued opposition to the document by the Association of Muslim Scholars, which represents hundreds of Sunni clerics from across the country, came after others, among them the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's largest Sunni political party, had signaled they would now support the charter. Iraq's Sunni Arab minority provides the backbone of the guerilla insurgency, which has intensified as the referendum approaches.
"We call on the people to boycott the referendum or to vote no," a spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars, Abdul Salam al-Qubaisi, said today at a news conference at the Um al-Qura mosque in Baghdad. He said that even with the latest amendment, the charter risked the breakup of Iraq and added that no constitution that was agreed to while the American-led coalition forces were still in the country could be considered legitimate.
The Iraqi Islamic Party is, uh, standing firm?:
Meanwhile, representatives of the Iraqi Islamic Party justified their decision to back the charter. "We were keen that Iraq should be stable," said Ayad al-Samarraie, a senior party official. "We didn't want this country to be in a state of turmoil because of constitutional disputes."
Mr. Samarraie added that he believed Sunni Arab support of the constitution and of the December legislative elections would give Sunnis more representation in the new parliament and thus a greater chance of pushing through desired changes to the charter. There were faint signs of movement among other Sunni leaders as well.
I assume Samarraie is not an idiot and understands that the Constitutional vote has nothing to do with picking the Parliament. So what is his real reason?
"It's a hard fact that if we want to achieve our demands of freeing the country from occupation, we have to engage in the political process to do so," another influential Sunni, Mahmood al-Mashhadani, said in an interview on Wednesday. "We will call on all the voters to say yes, because there is no meaning in saying no."
No meaning in saying No? Huh? And how to misinterpret the developments:
The mixed reaction among Sunni leaders, while perhaps not quite what the Iraqi government and its American backers were hoping for, suggested that the strategy of driving a wedge into the Sunni population was showing some success.
The plan is to drive a wedge into the Sunni population? Holy shit. We are so fucked. That is the "plan" now?
Good. Then that wedge can be further driven into the Shiite/Sunni/Kurd split. This is just unbelievable.