Sunnis Learn the Power of Deadlines

May 7, 2007 at 3:02 pm | Posted in American politics, Bush Administration, Iraq, War | Leave a comment

Wow, I’m impressed, the Sunnis are threatening to walk out of the Iraqi government by May 15 (which is just next week!!!), if there are not major changes to the Iraqi Constitution. This is major.

Iraq’s top Sunni official has set a deadline of next week for pulling his entire bloc out of the government — a potentially devastating blow to reconciliation efforts within Iraq. He also said he turned down an offer by President Bush to visit Washington until he can count more fully on U.S. help.

Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi made his comments in an interview with CNN. He said if key amendments to the Iraq Constitution are not made by May 15, he will step down and pull his 44 Sunni politicians out of the 275-member Iraqi parliament.

“If the constitution is not subject to major changes, definitely, I will tell my constituency frankly that I have made the mistake of my life when I put my endorsement to that national accord,” he said.

Specifically, he wants guarantees in the constitution that the country won’t be split into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish federal states that he says will disadvantage Sunnis.

There is a reason why he’s put such a short deadline. It seems the Bush Administration, among its multitude of other ineptitudes has forgotten to do something:

Al-Hashimi’s Iraqi Islamic Party was key in getting Sunnis out to vote in the December 2005 election. Sunnis had been reluctant to take part in the political process, and many were only convinced to do so with the promise of changes to the Iraqi Constitution. Al-Hashimi said the United States co-signed those changes, and now a year and a half later nothing has been done.

Without a change to the constitution, he said, “The situation would be a disaster for Iraq.”

He added, “I would like to see the identity of my country, in fact, restored back.”

So for a whole year and a half, the United States has not done anything they have promised regarding changing the Constitution to mollify Sunnis. I’m not really surprised. So the Sunnis are using one of their most powerful cards: deadlines and real threats of withdrawals. (Again for some reason threats of withdrawals work everywhere else in the world but here in stubborn America…why is that?) If they withdraw from the government, it will probably collapse, seeing that it would not be anything what it is supposed to be.

So yeah, the surge, it sure looks like it is working well, no?