Two Weeks Until Meltdown?

It is less than two weeks before the country of Iraq casts an up-or-down vote on the Iraqi Constitution which is set for October 15th, 2005, and to be sure that everything is alright and stable before such a critical election, the Iraqi President has asked the Iraqi Prime Minister to leave.

Additionally, it appears that Parliament wishes to make it much more difficult to defeat the Constitution (which not many Iraqi's have had a chance to read because its text had not been finalized and distributed for printing even by early last week) during the upcoming vote. From the article linked above [special thanks to Juan Cole for linking to it]

"... parliament, which has only 16 Sunni members, approved an interpretation stating that two-thirds of registered voters - rather than two-thirds of all those who cast ballots - must reject the constitution for the rules to apply."

The thought process behind such a move goes like this: "If the Sunnis wish to defeat this by voting, we should strangle them with rules that make voting illusory. This will lead to a decrease in violence."

It is incomprehensible to adopt such a rule at this late stage. Parliament is asking for civil war.

It is incredible that roughly one year ago the American public's mood had begun to shift on the worthiness of the adventure in Iraq, but still elected the engineer of said adventure by the slimmest of margins.

It can scarcely get better.