Desperation

by DemFromCT

[UPDATE]: What's this to do with Plame/Miller/Rove? Everything.

Less than a week before voting, and in no way able to inform the polulace, the Iraqi government has yet again changed the constitution up for a vote on Saturday.

The change would create a panel in the next parliament with the power to propose broad new revisions to the constitution. In effect, the change could give the Sunnis - who were largely shut out of the constitution-writing process - a new chance to help redraft the document after elections in December.

The agreement was a major victory for American officials, who had spent weeks urging Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish leaders to make changes that could soften Sunni opposition to the charter and forge a broader consensus. The Americans had voiced fears that if the constitution passed over strong Sunni opposition, more would turn toward violence.

The breakthrough came as insurgents continued their intensified campaign to create chaos, carrying out at least a dozen attacks across Iraq that left at least 42 people dead and dozens wounded. The biggest attack, a bombing in Tal Afar, killed at least 27.

As Juan Cole put it:

The Shiites and Kurds have agreed that the newly elected parliament after December 15 will reopen negotiations with the Sunni Arabs on the constitution. This step was enough to convince the Iraqi Islamic Party to drop its call for a Sunni Arab rejection fo the constitution in the October 15 referendum. This whole episode strikes me as bizarre, since Iraqis are now voting on a constitution that may be subsequently changed at will! As with the Jan. 30 parliamentary elections, in which they had no idea for whom they were voting for the most part, so in the referendum they will have no idea for what they are voting.

Now there's a choice between accepting tha constitution and descending into chaos, and rejecting the constitution and descending into chaos. The moves by House Democrats to clarify an alternative would be most welcome.

Comments

[DemFromCT]

see also:
More foreboding and stark prognoses on Iraq from insiders

[DemFromCT]

PS note Matthews:

As NBC's Chris Matthews reminds us, while the ultimate result of this investigation may be the indictment of one or more Bush officials, what this is about is the Administration's case for going to war, which centered on WMD which were never found. On that note, the CIA releases a report today which, USA Today says, "rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq. Policymakers worried more about making the case for the war, particularly the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, than planning for the aftermath, the report says."

[wd]

I stumbled across this the other day, a March 2003 roadmap put out by CSIS for dealing with the aftermath of Iraq, a little blast from the past to remind us that some people took the post-war planning seriously, just not the ones that happened to matter at the time.

[emptypockets]

It's like they're writing their constitution by wiki

[Meteor Blades]

Snort. Still chuckling over that one, emptypockets.

[DemFromCT]

the wiki would do a better job.