PITCHING WOO:

US, Iraqis woo groups that boycotted election (Anne Barnard, February 10, 2005, Boston Globe)

[B]y their own admission, the groups being courted could more easily find common ground acting as spoilers against a draft constitution. Arab nationalists, many of them secular Sunnis, and some factions loyal to Sadr, say they have already discussed the possibility of working together to organize opposition to the first draft -- not a word of which has been written -- in a referendum scheduled for August.

All the outsider factions do agree on one issue.

''What we have in common is our desire to get rid of the occupation," said Wamidh Nadhmi, a professor of political science at Baghdad University and a leader of the Arab Nationalist Party, which says it promotes the secular anticolonial ideals of the early Ba'ath Party, but not Saddam Hussein's cult of personality. ''Our common ground is objecting to the ruling clique."

Interviews with parties being wooed show that the new government faces the same trouble that US officials have had in finding spokespeople for disaffected Iraqis: Neither the violent opposition groups nor the many Iraqis who passively reject the US-backed government have a united, readily identifiable leadership that can deliver their cooperation.

''Very frankly speaking, the Sunni community is very fractured, the leadership is very fractured," a Western diplomat in Iraq, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters recently. ''It's very hard to find anyone in the Sunni community who represents a significant portion of it."

There is no opposition, just opponents and there's no point trying to satisfy such individualized concerns.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2005 8:23 AM