Sunday, October 02, 2005
Pundit RhetIraq: Juan Cole
Who: Juan Cole (Professor of History at the University of Michigan)
Source: JuanCole.com
Quotes:
I got a lot of flak for calling the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq a sick joke because there had been no campaigning and the names of the candidates were not known until the last minute, and because the Sunni Arabs wouldn't be represented. But now everyone in Iraq is complaining about the sectarian and do-nothing government that resulted from those anonymous elections (however bravely and however imbued with national spirit the Iraqi public went into them), and of course the absence of the Sunni Arabs has pushed them ever further into violent opposition.
Let me now risk some more flak and say that given that it is two weeks before the referendum and no ordinary Iraqis have seen the text of the new constitution, and given that the Sunni Arabs reject it to a person even just from the little they know of it, this constitution is another sick joke played by the Bush administration, which keeps forcing Iraq to jump through hoops made in Washington as "milestones" and "tipping points" to which the Republican Party can point as progress. Not to mention that the draft we have all seen of the constitution is riddled with fatal contradictions that will tie up the energies of parliament and the courts for decades trying to resolve them.
Source: JuanCole.com
Quotes:
I got a lot of flak for calling the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq a sick joke because there had been no campaigning and the names of the candidates were not known until the last minute, and because the Sunni Arabs wouldn't be represented. But now everyone in Iraq is complaining about the sectarian and do-nothing government that resulted from those anonymous elections (however bravely and however imbued with national spirit the Iraqi public went into them), and of course the absence of the Sunni Arabs has pushed them ever further into violent opposition.
Let me now risk some more flak and say that given that it is two weeks before the referendum and no ordinary Iraqis have seen the text of the new constitution, and given that the Sunni Arabs reject it to a person even just from the little they know of it, this constitution is another sick joke played by the Bush administration, which keeps forcing Iraq to jump through hoops made in Washington as "milestones" and "tipping points" to which the Republican Party can point as progress. Not to mention that the draft we have all seen of the constitution is riddled with fatal contradictions that will tie up the energies of parliament and the courts for decades trying to resolve them.
