Well, they certainly kept this quiet: a majority of the Iraqi Parliament now backs US withdrawal:
On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.It's a hugely significant development. Lawmakers demanding an end to the occupation now have the upper hand in the Iraqi legislature for the first time; previous attempts at a similar resolution fell just short of the 138 votes needed to pass (there are 275 members of the Iraqi parliament, but many have fled the country's civil conflict, and at times it's been difficult to arrive at a quorum).
As the article notes, this should lead to a binding vote, which will see Iraq's democratically elected Parliament formally tell their occupiers to get out. The question is whether those occupiers will listen to them, or abandon any pretence that they are there to "bring democracy".
(Hat tip: Rusty Idols).
And the other side of the coin is that until now a majority in the Iraqi parliament didn't want the coalition troops to go.
ReplyDeleteThe writers of that article are a bit suspect. They bizarrely call Maliki a "separatist" and therefore a Baddy. In comparison Saleh Al-Mutlaq gets called a "nationalist leader", and therefore a Goody. Saleh Al-Mutlaq was a Ba'athist who made lots of money out of the Saddam regime and for a while tried to set himself up as leader of the Sunni "resistance".
Maliki is be the one lefties should be supporting.