Iraq’s presidential council rejected a plan for new provincial elections and sent the bill back to parliament Wednesday for reworking, a major setback to U.S.-backed efforts to promote national reconciliation.
The ruling came despite a reported last-minute telephone call by Vice President Dick Cheney to the main holdout on the three-member panel, which has to sign off on laws passed by the legislature. The White House tried to put its best face on the development, saying “this is democracy at work.”
The outcome underscored the immense challenges involved in efforts to distribute power among Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds five years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Such power-sharing agreements are the end goal of last year’s buildup of U.S. troops. The hope has been that the declining bloodshed will remove the fear that has paralyzed Iraqi politicians, enabling them to compromise and strike deals across the sectarian divide. And that, in theory, should blunt support for the Sunni insurgency and allow American troops to withdraw from the country… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Huffington Post>
The Bush/GOP Reich has touted the passage of this bill by the Iraqi parliament heavily to support the absurd notion that the surge, aka the ChickenHawk charge, is working. That the Iraqi factions are still not willing to settle their differences is the best evidence there is that it is not. As long as US troops are there to keep the lid on the pot, the squabbling Iraqi leaders have no incentive to come together. On the other hand, faced with a timetable for withdrawal, the4y might be willing to settle rather than face the chaotic consequences of their intransigence.
Cross posted from Politics Plus
