Iraqi parliament to prepare response to U.S. Senate's partition resolution

Baghdad, Oct 1, (VOI) – The Iraqi parliament will debate in its ordinary session on Tuesday the reply to the U.S. Congress resolution on the division of Iraq into three Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni entities, parliamentary sources said on Monday.

"The debate about a reply to the U.S. Senate resolution on the division of Iraq will be of top priority in Tuesday's session," Dr. Hanin al-Qadou, a legislator from the Shiite Unified Iraqi Coalition (UIC), told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
He expected the reply to be in "the form of a statement by the Iraqi parliament on this issue in view of the fact that enacting a legislation could take a long time."
He pointed out that the matter does not even require enacting a law because the content of the American resolution flagrantly interfered in Iraq's internal affairs, let alone its violation of the Iraqi constitution.
Qadou noted that the Iraqi constitution guarantees the country's "territorial integrity and national sovereignty," adding the Congress' resolution "can never change Iraq's settled national principles."

He said the U.S. resolution "only aimed to cause Iraq to slide into the pits of a civil war only God knows when it will end."

(Aswat Aliraq)

The United States really on has one type of leverage when it comes to Iraqi politics. That is assistance in the form of military and economic help. A congress geared toward disengagement has no standing to tell the Iraqi government what it should do, and even as a friendly suggestion it was never likely to do more than offend the Iraqis.

Though the Kurds, despite themselves and their rocky relationship with Turkey do seem to favor the idea (Iraqi Kurdistan was the region most predisposed to independence even before the Senate's resolution).


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