Some of my predictions
from last week were wrong: It looks like two
provinces went at least 2/3rds against the constitution while at least one more looks like it had at least 50% voting against ratification. The fourth province, Ninevah, according to the Indepedent passed the ratification after many Sunnis were intimidiated to stay home. I only thought a single province would be able to vote to the supermajority against ratification as the constitution is fundamentally a "Fuck the Sunni" document but that the combination of polling places not appearing on schedule, the IIP deal, intimidation, local shenanigans, and the lack of three homogenous Sunni Arab overwhelmingly dominated provinces would have kept the non-ratification to one.
But the essence of my prediction from last week still stands, and if anything I will expand it:
I also don't think that the Sunni Arab insurgency will fundamentally change in its capabilities, goals, intentions and popular support within the Sunni Arab population because of escape hatched Calvinball 'political' process. Time is on their side, not the US's.
We will have another purple finger moment, and in a couple of weeks look back and see that it is not changing anything on the ground. Instead it was just another confirmation of what is happening on the ground.
If anything the situation is a bit worse because I thought that the Iraq Islamic Party (IIP) would have had more influence with the deal that was fundamentally a kick it to a committee for a special blue ribbon commission report on giving the Sunni's some window dressing in the next go around. However with two provinces rejecting outright, and two more seeing extremely heavy Sunni votes against ratification it reveals the weakness of the negoatiate/integrate into the political process viewpoint is within the Sunni Arab population. If the IIP was influential, it should have been able to swing more votes to its way in at least Sal ah Din province.
So right now, the optimistic take is that the deal that the IIP cut gives Iraq another four months to negoatiate the constitution that it should have negoatiated before Bush pushed the pressure to meet the first deadline instead of asking for the six months that they could have asked for. The pessimistic take is that the Sunni Arab populatoin is seeing that it is an irrelevant political group within the Iraq that is forming now and that armed resistance is the better way of getting a tolerable deal when the Americans leave than participating in politics. At the same time, the politically orientated groups are discredited because they did not have the pull that they thought that they had to get the deal to go through in all but Anbar. The middle case scenario is that the Sunni Arab population goes the Sinn Fein route of ballots and bullets.