The World’s Quickest Deliberative Body
That would be the Iraqi people, maybe:
“There is no D-Day,” said Ali Dabagh of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition that dominates the assembly and the Iraqi government. “Negotiations can continue until Oct. 15.”
From the LA Times. October 15 is when the national referendum on the draft constitution is due to take place. Ali Dabagh is suggesting that the people of Iraq can decide the merits of the text in - that would be not even a full day.
Now the worst thing of all is that, in a very real sense, Ali Dabagh is right, at least as to expectations. What everyone expects is that voters will go the way their parties tell them to go. Kurds will vote for any constitution that gets reported out with the blessings of the Kurdish parties, SCIRI-tendency Shiites will vote for any constitution that Jafaari and his people bless, the Sadrists and Sunnis will vote against anything their capos tell them has too much federalism and for their different reasons the Badr Brigades and Al Qaeda in Iraq will try to suppress No votes as much as possible. (Badr militias will try to hold down Sadrist, secular and Shiite voting in the Baghdad area out of fear that in combination they could hit the 67% provincial Anti level that endangers adoption. Zarqawi’s bunch will try to suppress the vote in Sunni areas because they can. They probably aren’t strong enough to affect the voting elsewhere.) The new Iraqi Army and police, substantially composed of Shiite militia and Kurdish peshmerga, will find themselves in a strange bedfellows relationship with their Zarqawist enemies in the Sunni triangle; for this brief shining moment they all want the same thing - to hold down Sunni voting in the Northwest. Don’t get attached.
Nowhere in this brief future history is there opportunity or interest in the Iraqi vox pop soberly reflecting on the text at hand and deciding, citizen by citizen, if they think it a firm foundation for their state. Theirs not to reason why, or whether.
