Sunni moves to unite with Shi'ites. posted by Richard Seymour

A commenter in the thread below draws my attention to this:

Iraq's disenchanted Sunni Arabs have reached out across the sectarian divide to seek alliances with any ethnic or religious groups opposed to the newly drafted constitution.

After staging demonstrations on Monday, Sunni leaders said they were opening talks with the movement of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and preparing a national conference to generate public support for defeating the charter at a mid-October referendum.

"We would like to cooperate with Muqtada al-Sadr and very soon we will start negotiations with him," said Salih al-Mutlaq, a top Sunni negotiator.

Smart move. There has already been Sunni-Shi'ite unity on the ground in both the armed and unarmed resistance. In the former, Shi'ites helped Sunnis fight occupation forces and Kurdish peshmergas in Tal Afar. In the latter, Sunnis and Shi'ites joined together in Firdos Square against the occupation, two years after Saddam's statue was felled as part of a US psy-op.

One thing the article, from Al Jazeera, doesn't make clear is that there is substantial hostility to federalism among many Shi'ites as evidenced in this mass demonstration. Indeed, the first whisper I heard that any significant Shi'ite group might back a federalist constitution was when Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the sectarian Shi'ite group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an Iran-backed organisation with a secret service developed under Iranian tutelage and a militia known as the Badr Corps which has been killing its opponents, both religious and political. A twist of historical irony is that the Badr Corps were suspected by the occupiers of being potential trouble-makers for them, whereas they immediately declared after the invasion that they would not fight the new government - indeed they may have fought for them in death squads.

It is long past time that pan-Iraqi unity was made official. These nuptials are just the beginning.