Something For Everyone, But The Sunnis Want It All

This just in...the Iraqis are writing a Constitution, have finished it, and decided to stop letting the recalcitrant Sunni rump faction stall a final vote on it:

Iraqi leaders completed a draft of a permanent constitution Sunday after three months of negotiations that left Sunni Arabs unsatisfied, setting up a potentially divisive nationwide referendum on the document to be held by October 15.

Members of the committee that convened in May to write the document ended their official duties by signing the draft and sending it to the National Assembly, where it was read aloud to members. Some Sunnis, who had unsuccessfully sought the elimination of a clause allowing power to be devolved from the central government to autonomous regions, walked out while the draft was read.

Well wah, wah, wah. The Sunnis could have participated in last January's election of the National Assembly, which would have provided them with representation in this process, but they boycotted that, too. And still the Shia and Kurds offered them a seat at the table, oil revenue concessions, reinstatement the Ba'ath Party (subject to de-Saddamization), and postponement any motions for federalism.

It wasn't enough, apparently, because the Shia and Kurds (GASP!) actually get some goodies as well. The Kurds get local autonomy, and the Shia get a ceremonial declaration of Islam as "the official religion" of the state, which Mark Steyn analogizes to Anglicanism in Great Britain - an observation more apt than it may first appear, since article 151 of the Iraqi constitution stipulates that "No less than 25% of Council of Deputies seats go to women." That's, BTW, 11% better than the U.S. Senate has ever managed. Expect to see feminists start agitating for an even bigger quota here.

Here's something I found particularly amusing in Cap'n Ed's post on this development:

[T]he Guardian reports that the Sunnis have asked other Arab nations to step in and block the draft from going to the voters, along with the UN and other international organizations. That end-run around democracy will not please their fellow Iraqis in the Kurdish and Shi'ite territories. The Kurds especially will resent Arab League interference, especially since they've run their own democracy in the north for over a decade while the Arab League tried to force the Coalition to leave Iraq to Saddam during the entire time since Gulf War I. No one in either group trusts the UN to do anything beneficial for anyone but the Sunni complainers, either, but the likelihood of UN action will remain nil with the US and UK pushing for a vote.

First the Sunnis get overrun in three weeks. Then they wage a terror war to try and drive out Iraq's liberators, and fail miserably. And now they're reduced to whining to their neighbors, who have anything but the Sunnis' interests at heart, and the same international organizations that were only too happy to profit from Saddam's systematic plundering of the Shia and Kurds. My, how the mighty have fallen.

And all the while, Mesopotamian democracy marches on - with or without the Sunnis.

They'd be well advised to grab that metaphorical train pulling out of the station - they're not going to get a better one, and it may be the last one coming through for a long, long time.