Oct 15, 09:34 PM
Iraq votes on its constitution
After the country’s 6,100 polling centers opened their doors at 7 a.m., people began lining up to get the paper ballots, check off “yes” or “no” for the constitution and drop the sheets into boxes. They then stamped their index fingers with purple ink to show they had voted.
That’s a beautiful thing.
The Times reports that power had been out during the night in Baghdad and much of southern Iraq due to what might be sabotage of a power line in northern Iraq. There was an IED attack that wounded two policemen in West Baghdad, and yesterday, before voting started, a few bombings and mortarings of polling stations around the country, but by today things were quiet.
Remarkably, that’s considered pretty good in Iraq, and news reports are generally describing calm and order. (“CNN correspondents in different parts of the country reported that voting was brisk.”)
It gives one a sense of hope and possibility to see people voting for their constitution. Of course, the constitution was arrived at by some rather interesting machinations, it includes deference to Koranic law that makes one nervous, the Sunnis are only weakly supporting it, many citizens are just voting how their clerics tell them to vote, and none of the three major ethnic groups seems much dedicated to a strong federal government.
So is the hope misplaced? I don’t know.
But Fred Kaplan sees a sliver of hope in the fact that the Sunnis seem to be playing ball at all, even if their willingness to participate in the vote comes on the condition that the constitution can and will be changed later, which is rather shaky footing from which to launch a country’s founding document. Drawing the Sunnis into the government means that you pull apart the three basic groups that make up the insurgency: former Baathists who resent losing power, nationalists who are just resisting US occupation, and the smallest but most dangerous and violent group, outright jihadists.
If the first two groups can be drawn into peacefully participating in government, Kaplan writes, the jihadists will be isolated and their attacks on Shiites and others (except Americans) will cause the terrorists to lose support around the Muslim world. It seems that even al Qaeda might realize this, as demonstrated by an intercepted letter (seemingly genuine) sent from Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of bin Laden’s top henchmen, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, chief executive murderer in Iraq, which surfaced this week. It calls on Zarqawi to stop murdering Shia, saying that it “won’t be acceptable to the Muslim populace, however much you have tried to explain it.”
So perhaps its possible that self-rule in which all three ethnic groups take part, combined with the US getting out of there as soon as possible, will render the jihadists without a target that anyone but they themselves consider legitimate. A sliver of hope, but better than nothing.
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