The consensus today seems to be that, “In the crucial central provinces with mixed ethnic and religious populations, enough Shiites and Kurds voted to stymie the Sunni bid to reject the constitution.”
According to the AP report,
The Sunni ”no” campaign appeared to have made the two-thirds threshold in Anbar province, the vast western Sunni heartland where Ramadi is the capital, and in Salahuddin, where Sunnis hold a large majority and as many as 90 percent of voters cast ballots. But in two other provinces where Sunni Arabs have only slim majorities — Ninevah and Diyala — the ”yes” vote apparently won out.As Chris Albritton pointed out in a passage I quoted yesterday,Sunni leaders responded angrily, some of them saying they suspected fraud and accusing American officials and the Shiite parties that dominate the government.
The absolute worst-case scenario is if the Sunnis come close to defeating the constitution, but fail. There will be accusations of vote-rigging and any political momentum the Sunnis felt was moving their way will be spent. The Shi’ites will have consolidated their power and those Sunnis on the fence might be moved into active opposition. The insurgency might even worsen, if such things are possible, or a close vote might be the trigger for open civil war.Of course, as so often is the case in Iraq, the worst case scenario was the most likely scenario. John Ward Anderson and K.I. Ibrahim report in the Washington Post today:
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I do think that defeating the constitution might be best in the long run. It will embolden the Sunnis and give them a political win, motivating them to further involve themselves in the political process. This will force the Shi’ites and Kurds to deal with real elected representatives instead of appointed ones. Will this spell and end to violence? Of course not, but anything that allows the Sunnis to claim victory instead of forcing them to eat political table scraps is a big step in ending the Sunni-led insurgency.
But it was unclear whether Sunnis would stay engaged in the political process if they thought it was stacked against them or perceived that they lost the referendum by fraud. Months of negotiations to win broad support from Iraq’s three main communities largely failed, as demonstrated by the Sunnis’ overwhelming rejection of the charter. In a sign of how deep and hard divisions ran, the no vote was as high as 90 percent in some Sunni communities, while some Shiites approved the charter by a similar figure, local officials said.That the perception of complete Sunni political marginalization is correct was underscored by statements made by triumphalist Shiite politicians like this one:
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As early tallies from the constitutional referendum emerged Sunday, some Sunni leaders cried foul, saying their field surveys showed that they had in fact crossed the threshold for defeating the proposal. They charged that the U.S.-backed government, a coalition of Shiite and Kurdish parties whose leaders dominated the drafting of the constitution, was stealing the election.
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“I believe they will rig the results and announce the success of the referendum, but our monitors reported to us that more than 80 percent of the voters in three governorates have said no to this draft,” Saleh Mutlaq, a spokesman for the Sunnis’ National Dialogue Council, told reporters at a news conference; Iraq’s provinces are formally called governorates. “This constitution is a menace to the unity and stability of Iraq, and we shall have no legal or legitimate means in order to defeat it.” (emphasis added)
Shiite leaders said the Sunni Muslims wouldn’t win enough seats in the next Assembly to make major changes to the document next year. The document will remain largely the same when voted on again.Those perpetual “bullets into ballots” cheerleaders of Bush’s “democracy spreading” agenda crowing that the Sunni vote shows they’ve been lured into the “political process” in Iraq by the constitutional bait, might do well to consider that the Sunni hope of having a voice in Iraqi politics has just been crushed. How they react to this proof of their subjection is yet to be seen.“The changes made (this week) on the permanent constitution were not very radical,” said Saad Jawad Khandeel of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Shiite political party. “Changes are normal, but I do not expect big changes” next year.