Iraq’s parliament met for the first time since the election today, with 255 of 328 MPs showing up, with others boycotting it outright. The session lasted less than a half hour before a walk out of Sunni and Kurd MPs meant they no longer had the quorum needed to vote on a parliamentary speaker.
Even the brief meeting reflected Iraq’s divided state, with a shouting match breaking out over a complaint by a Kurdish MP that the central government has stopped paying all officials in Kurdistan, leading Shi’ites to blame the Kurds for the ISIS takeover of the West.
“We will crush beneath our shoe anyone who tears down the Iraqi flag,” one of the State of Law MPs screamed at the Kurdish constituents, while others demanded the Kurdish Peshmearga defeat ISIS for the Iraqis before trying to assert any rights for the Kurdish region.
Iraq’s Shi’ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had sought not only a speaker at today’s session, but for the parliament to name a consensus president and premier as well. In the end, none of that happened, and
phracking children… sounds too much like the Congress we have.
What a mess.
It's like I'm really watching Battlestar Galactica.
> In the end, none of that happened, and
Someone must have gotten to Jason.
I can't fault the Kurds or the Sunni from walking out. After all, the only thing that really matters to the people in that region are the factions: Sunni, Kurd, and Shia. It's been that way for hundreds of years. Heck, the Ottoman Empire had so much trouble with the three factions, they eventually set up 3 different provinces to separate them: the Basra Province, the Mosul Province, and the Baghdad Province. The irony is, the United States is really fighting to maintain the British created borders that we now call Iraq, not for the interests of the people within it.
One big happy family, the truly need a divorce.
Did you notice that every country the US brings "democracy" to becomes Somalia? A lot of people in the world have noticed.