I am reading about Iraq's law makers. Law makers are the elected parliamentary people. So in Iraq there are two types of lawmakers called The Nationalists and The Separatists. The nationalists are the people who want to keep Iraq as a whole. The separatists are backed by US and Britain and want to divide Iraq into ethnic areas.
The administration of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government is dominated by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish separatists. That is the cabinet. They want to make three autonomous regions with strong local governments and weak central government. Then they want to privotise the oil and gas industry and decentralise operations and distribution of petroleum.
The rest of the parliament is from the nationalists block with Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish lawmakers. They do not want any of these to happen. But the problem here is US and Britain do not like these lawmakers. They have been trying to get the US and UK to partcipate in a dialogue but US and UK are not playing that game.
As I read this:
"A sovereign and unified Iraq, free of sectarian violence, is what George Bush and Tony Blair claim they want most. The most likely reason that the United States and Britain have rebuffed those Iraqi nationalists who share those goals is that the nationalists oppose permanent basing rights and the privatization of Iraq's oil sector. The administration, along with their allies in Big Oil, has pressed the Iraqi government to adopt an oil law that would give foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than they enjoy in other major oil producing countries and would lock in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades.
Al-Shammari said this week: "We're afraid the U.S. will make us pass this new oil law through intimidation and threatening. We don't want it to pass, and we know it'll make things worse, but we're afraid to rise up and block it, because we don't want to be bombed and arrested the next day." In the Basrah province, where his Al-Fadhila party dominates the local government, Al-Shammari's fellow nationalists have been attacked repeatedly by separatists for weeks, while British troops in the area remained in their barracks."
This stands to reason as the rich people in the community are educated in rich foreign countries and pay homage to those countries and the poor people have to tag along to them or get killed if they protest. This goes on in most of the "civilised" world. We in UK are not excluded in this club. This means that the rich will rule over the poor whatever the circumstantces.. Sorry I went into phylosophosing again!!!!
So on 8th of May this year the Iraqi Parliament passed a bill with more than half the members for the foreign troups to be out of the country. They got 144 out of 275 members. But that was not binding. On June the 5th the lawmakers passed a binding resolution that will guarantee lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the U.N. mandate under which coalition troops now remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal in December. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose cabinet is dominated by Iraqi separatists, may veto the measure. They want conditions put into the UN mandate like the timetable for withdrawal of foreign troups when it comes for renewal in December. This is correct as 92% of the people who were asked wanted foreign troups out, in 2004.
In "Iraqi Lawmakers Pass Resolution That May Force End to Occupation" it says:
"Iraqi lawmaker Jabir Habib (a Shia closely aligned with the al-Sadrist Movement) said in an interview last fall that the Iraqi Assembly had been poised to vote on the issue. "We spent the last months discussing the conditions we wanted to add to the mandate," he said, "and the majority of the parliament decided on three major conditions. These conditions included pulling the coalition forces out of the cities and transferring responsibility for security to the Iraqi government, giving Iraqis the right to recruit, train, equip and command the Iraqi security forces, and requiring that the U.N. mandate expire and be reviewed every six months instead of every 12 months."
Lawmakers said that while they likely had enough support to require a timetable for withdrawal as a condition of the mandate's renewal last year, they were sidelined by al-Maliki when the prime minister sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council requesting an extension without consulting members of parliament. The move outraged lawmakers. "
Now in November Bush and co are trying to block the UN mandate which the majority of Iraqs want for their country.
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