Jonathan Steele writing in The Guardian seems upset that the Iraqi people told him and all the other naysayers to shove it. Steele writes:

The result was delayed by more than a week after officials said preliminary results showed an “unusually high” number of yes votes but, after checking, the election commission said it was satisfied the constitution had passed.”

Oh, I see, the fact that the vast majority of Iraqi’s want their own government, not terror by a minority sect, not by Zarqawi or other “insurgents” causes one to think that the vote should only have barely carried, if at all.

Iraqi voters overwhelmingly passed the new Constitution by a substantial margin of 79% to 21% and in doing so, said business as usual won’t cut it anymore. The legal wrangling for the constitution allowed for rejection of the Constitution if 65% of the voters in at least three provinces voted “No” on the issue. When the vote was counted, two provinces rejected the issue and one voted “No” by a margin of 55% to 45%, short of the 65% required. The two provinces rejecting the constitution were Sunni strongholds of Anbar and Salaheddin and a third (a near miss electoral wise) Nineveh, did not. Nineveh is the location of the city of Mosul where feelings have run high, but has a mixed religious base of both Sunni and Shia.

It is obvious that the minority Sunni’s are angry and upset about loosing the power they held under Saddam and are worried about a couple of real issues under the new Constitution. One of those is sharing oil wealth based on where the oil is located. Most of the oil in Iraq is located in Shia and Kurdish dominated provinces and how they spend the money derived from sales is an issue, one that really must be looked at in the future for all Iraqi’s, not just based on “who is in power.”

Nevertheless, this is not a killer issue unless made so by the Sunni. It is precisely Sunni intransigence that allowed the current interim government to be established by boycotting the January elections. The Sunni realized the folly of that and overwhelmingly voted in the October election, but in insufficient numbers to defeat the draft constitution.

Naysayers, have long held that the Iraqi people are incapable of voting for themselves, that civil war is on the brink, that Iraq is “united” in wanting to throw out the Coalition troops, and that there is an “insurgency” going on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Michael Yon, on the ground with troops discusses the election in the recent Weekly Standard (and his site here)and lays out the issues, the vote and the results.

Jonathan Steele however will have none of it. Steele writes:

But many observers fear the constitution will undermine Iraq as a state. It minimizes the role of the army by devolving security to local militias, is obscure about who is in charge of taxation, leaves oil revenues to the provinces, and allows local religious authorities the final say on family matters. The state will only have control over “current” oil production; future development can be sold to foreign companies.

The Iraqi people have spoken, get used to it Jonathan!

XPosted at GM’s Corner

Said GM @ 3:14 pm | Permalink   

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