Iraqi election, has Sunni participation overated

Charles Krauthammer:

In 1864, 11 of the 36 United States did not participate in the presidential election. Was Abraham Lincoln's election therefore illegitimate? In 1868, three states did not participate in the election. Was Ulysses Grant's election illegitimate?

There has been much talk that if the Iraqi election is held and some Sunni Arab provinces (perhaps three of the 18) do not participate, the election will be illegitimate. Nonsense. The election should be held. It should be open to everyone. If Iraq's Sunni Arabs - barely 20% of the population - decide they cannot abide giving up their 80 years of minority rule, tough luck. They forfeit their chance to participate in the new Iraq.

Americans are dying right now to give them that chance. The U.S. is making a costly last-ditch effort to midwife a new, unitary Iraq. The Fallujah and related offensives are designed to reduce the brutal intimidation of the Sunni population by the dead-end Baathists and others seeking to retake the power they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein.

But when those offensives are over, the Sunnis will have to make a choice. Either they join the new Iraq by participating in the coming election or they institutionalize the civil war their side has already begun.

...

Our taking on the Sunnis is a way of showing good faith, as is our intention to hold the election no matter what. Everyone knows the outcome will be a historic transfer of power to Shiites (and, to some extent, Kurds). We must make it clear that we will be there to support that new government.

But we also have to make it clear that we are not there to lead the fight indefinitely. It is their civil war.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more