Thank you for NOT unnecessarily excerpting this article.
Posted on 08/28/2005 7:01:53 AM PDT by goldstategop
The constitutional wrangling in Baghdad is par for the course in Iraq's nation-building -- at least as filtered through the Western media. As the deadline approaches, we read that the whole magilla's about to go belly up, there's no agreement on the way forward, Washington's going to have to admit it called things disastrously wrong and step in to salvage what it can by postponing the handover to an Iraqi administration/the first free elections/the draft constitution/whatever.
This time 'round, we were reliably informed that the constitution was turning into a theocratic rout of Kurds, women and any other identity groups the media could rustle up. I'm not sure what the gay scene's like in Fallujah, but no doubt the Shia were railroading through constitutional prohibitions on same-sex partner benefits for gay imams, too. Iraqi women were better off under Saddam, we were told by various types, though the wags at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a David Horsey cartoon showing Condi assuring Bush "they won't get stoned to death as long as they keep their burqas on tight."
Ha-ha. So what do we find in Article 151 of the Iraqi constitution?
"No less than 25 percent of Council of Deputies seats go to women."
I'm not a great fan of quotas but for purposes of comparison, after two-and-a-quarter centuries, in the United States Senate, 14 percent of the seats are held by women.
The only burqa on too tight here is the one David Horsey's pulled over his head with the eye-slit round the back. Has he ever met an Iraqi woman?
Iraqi nation-building coverage is like one almighty cable-news Hurricane Ahmed. The network correspondents climb into their oilskins and waders and wrap themselves round a lamppost on the boardwalk and insist that civil war's about to make landfall any minute now, devastating the handover/elections/constitution. But it never does. Hurricane Ahmed is simply the breezy back and forth of healthy politicking.
Remember the Afghan war? On Nov. 7, 2001, the New York Times' Maureen Dowd was sneering at the Northern Alliance for being a lot of useless layabout deadbeats. "They smoke and complain more than they fight," she scoffed. A couple of days later, Kabul fell so swiftly that on Nov. 14 Dowd switched smoothly -- with only the mildest case of columnar whiplash -- to whining that the hitherto layabout Northern Alliance had "embarrassed" us with their "savage force."
That's the way our Iraqi allies work, too. They have to be nudged along -- which is why the U.S. strategy of hard (or hard-ish) deadlines works well -- but in the end they get there.
"What makes a good constitution?" asked National Review's Rick Brookhiser the other day. "Standoffs and horsetrades, frozen in time."
The English-speaking world's most significant and enduring constitutional settlements -- Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights -- were the compromises of rival power blocs: King John vs. England's barons, federalists vs. anti-federalists.
Brookhiser didn't add that the least enduring are those drafted by an ideologically homogeneous ruling class: This year's much ballyhooed European Union constitution, for example, was dead on arrival. By contrast, the constitution being hammered out in Baghdad reflects political reality. What the naysayers cite as the main drawback of Iraq -- it's not a real country, just a phony-baloney jurisdiction cobbled together to suit the administrative convenience of the British Colonial Office, never gonna work, bound to fall apart -- is, in fact, its big advantage: If you want to start an experiment in Middle Eastern liberty, where better than a nation split three ways where no one group can easily dominate the other two? The new constitution provides something for everyone:
The Shia get an acknowledgment that Islam is "the official religion of the state," just as the Church of England is the official church of that state -- though, unlike the Anglican bishops, Iraq's imams won't get permanent seats in the national legislature.
The Kurds get a loose federal structure in which just about everything except national defense and foreign policy is reserved to regions and provinces. I said in the week after Baghdad fell that the Kurds would settle for being Quebec to Iraq's Canada, and so they have.
The Sunnis, who ran Iraq from their days as Britain's colonial managing class right up to the toppling of Saddam, don't like the federal structure, not least because it's the Kurds and Shia who have the bulk of the oil. So they've been wooed with an arrangement whereby the country's oil revenue will be divided at a national level on a per-capita basis.
If you'd been asked in 2003 to devise an ideal constitution for Iraq's very non-ideal circumstances, it would look something like this: a highly decentralized federation that accepts the reality that Iraq is a Muslim nation but reserves political power for elected legislators -- and divides the oil revenue fairly.
And if it doesn't work? Well, that's what the Sunnis are twitchy about. If Baathist dead-enders and imported Islamonuts from Saudi and Syria want to make Iraq ungovernable, the country will dissolve into a democratic Kurdistan, a democratic Shiastan, and a moribund Sunni squat in the middle. And, in the grander scheme of things, that wouldn't be so terrible either.
In Iraq right now the glass is around two-thirds full, and those two thirds will not be drained down to Sunni Triangle levels of despair. There are 1 million new cars on the road since 2003, a statistic that no doubt just lost us warhawks that Sierra Club endorsement but which doesn't sound like a nation mired in hopelessness. A new international airport has been opened in the north to cope with the Kurdish tourist and economic boom. Faruk Mustafa Rasool is building a 28-story five-star hotel with a revolving restaurant and a cable-car link to downtown Sulaimaniya.
To be sure, we shouldda done this, and we shouldda done that. Yet nonetheless Iraq advances day by day. The real quagmire is at home, where the kinkily gleeful relish of defeatism manifested by Cindy Sheehan, Joan Baez, Ted Kennedy et al. bears less and less relationship to anything happening over there. Iraq's future is a matter for the Iraqis now -- which, given the U.S. media, Democrat blowhards like Joe Biden and Republican squishes like Chuck Hagel, is just as well.
As Mark Steyn writes, take the draft clause reserving a quota of seats for women:
"No less than 25 percent of Council of Deputies seats go to women."
I'm not a great fan of quotas but for purposes of comparison, after two-and-a-quarter centuries, in the United States Senate, 14 percent of the seats are held by women.
Far more progressive than the "enlightened" United States and revolutionary by the standards of the Middle East's male-dominated societies. But the Left gives Iraq no credit for empowering women.
Good constitutions are a bundle of compromises. The much ballyhooed EU Constitution was moribound because it assumed a mythical European identity and made no attempt to parcel out power or to limit it. In contrast, Iraq's constitution does exactly both of those things. That's exactly why it has a better chance of success than the critics think.
The Shia get an acknowledgment that Islam is "the official religion of the state," just as the Church of England is the official church of that state -- though, unlike the Anglican bishops, Iraq's imams won't get permanent seats in the national legislature.
The Kurds get a loose federal structure in which just about everything except national defense and foreign policy is reserved to regions and provinces. I said in the week after Baghdad fell that the Kurds would settle for being Quebec to Iraq's Canada, and so they have.
The Sunnis, who ran Iraq from their days as Britain's colonial managing class right up to the toppling of Saddam, don't like the federal structure, not least because it's the Kurds and Shia who have the bulk of the oil. So they've been wooed with an arrangement whereby the country's oil revenue will be divided at a national level on a per-capita basis.
If you'd been asked in 2003 to devise an ideal constitution for Iraq's very non-ideal circumstances, it would look something like this: a highly decentralized federation that accepts the reality that Iraq is a Muslim nation but reserves political power for elected legislators -- and divides the oil revenue fairly.
And it has transpired exactly as Mark Steyn predicted. In the end Iraq will be a much more democratic society than many Western states. That's what I suspect really bothers the Left. They can't overcome their provincial blinkers and admit a Third World people is ready to embark on the nuts and bolts work of democratic self-government. The worst that could happen is Iraq could break apart. So let's give it a chance before saying its all over and picking up our marbles and going home in a snit. Its the Iraqis who are making history here in writing a constitution that reflects the diverse reality of their country, not our domestic Jihad Cindy/Ted Kennedy/Chuck Hagel blowhards who pronounce we're in Vietnam and want to declare democracy a failure just when the Iraqis want to give it the good old fashioned college try. We should be so humble considering the messy origins of American democracy.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
BTTT
The Iraquis are in the process of debating, negotiating, compromising and approving their new constitution.
No democracy here!
I wish the MSM would just listen to themselves!
They claim that Sunni opposition means this is a void process while complimenting the Democrats in this country for their opposition.
Liberal hypocrisy knows no bounds.
We'll see what happens in October -- I'm going to be on pins and needles. It will be a bummer if the constitution is rejected -- we'll have to wait while another round of elections and constitutional horsetrading takes place, and meanwhile the insurgents keep bombing and the media keeps reporting it and the American public are going to get more and more tired of the whole thing... I'm a neurotic worrier, can't you tell?
The left is consumed by their overwhelming desire for BUSH to fail.
There seems to be very little appreciation for some 50 million people being FReed from tyranny.
Mass graves, yea but what about no WMD they say. Bush lied they say. They U.N. didn't approve they say(can you say oil for food scam).
It will be important for the future that they don't get to write all the history books, that's for sure.
Thank you Steyn, you've nailed it as usual.
Oh, for a minute there I thought Steyn was talking about the European Union. BTW, how is their constitution doing?
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Thank you for NOT unnecessarily excerpting this article.
The left has long abandoned democracy as a way of life. Their politics are intimidation and fraud, with no room for compromise, and are the last ones to consult in pursuits of freedom.
bttt
No more - no less.
Not with 72 MRI's/CAT scans. ;^)
bttt
They must think the Sunni Constitutional Framers are as obstructionist as Senate Democrats.
"No less than 25 percent of Council of Deputies seats go to women."
I'm not a great fan of quotas but for purposes of comparison, after two-and-a-quarter centuries, in the United States Senate, 14 percent of the seats are held by women.
Are the Council of Deputies elected or appointed? If elected, how can this 25% figure be guaranteed and still maintain free elections? If appointed, then Steyn's comparison to the U. S. Senate is meaningless, because U. S. Senators are elected by the people.
"BTW, how is their [EU] constitution doing?"
It was DOA as soon as the people were actually allowed to vote on it, and I haven't heard anything since. I think this is a great analogy.
He spelled "megillah" wrong.
bttt
Four months. So why did the administration say that the Iraqi constitution would be done by now if they weren't convinced it could be done?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.