As expected the new Iraqi constitution couldn’t be agreed upon by all parties – please see my previous postings on why!
This is obviously a major setback for President Bush as he had hoped to use the passage of the new constitution as an excuse to hightail it back home (with tail behind the US military’s hind legs). The US wants desperately to extricate itself from the Iraqi quagmire once it can be assured that the oil assets are in “good hands”.
Bush isn’t the most popular guy in the USA, with mothers and dads of dead soldiers starting the same anti-war swell that had brought Lyndon B Johnson down during the horrendous Vietnam war. Though the growing anti-Republican Party feelings may not affect Bush personally as he is already in the second term, he still doesn’t want t go out of office as the most unpopular president ever. Besides, his successors may be affected. There are now talks about Dick Cheney holding 2008 until Jeb Bush would be ready in 2012.
Some US experts have pointed out that in the matter of the new Iraqi constitution, the Bush Administration has been its own worst enemy. They reckon there’s too much American pressure on the the interim Iraqi government and constitution draftees. The Iraqi people see the US as playing the principal role in the drafting of the constitution. That certainly brings into disrepute and lack of credibility of the Iraqi Constitution as one that's according to Bush.
For example, experts mentioned that Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador in Iraq, has been too prominent in pushing the Iraqis on the constitution, which of course revealed the fact that it is the US who’s pulling the strings. And that includes contentious issues like ‘federalism’, oil revenue distribution and the Kurdish peshmerga, its private army.
All seems to be pointing to the US hands in fostering conditions ideal for the disintegration of Iraq as we know it.
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