Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

New Constitution Has Something For Every One (Mark Steyn Iraqi Freedom Alert)
Chicago Sun-Times ^ | 08/28/05 | Mark Steyn

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.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; Philosophy; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: compromise; freedom; iraqiconstitution; novietnam; progress
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-23 last
To: goldstategop
"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."

And (from two paragraphs earlier) the Kurds and Shi'ites would have most of the oil.
21 posted on 08/29/2005 2:06:39 PM PDT by decal ("The Republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: goldstategop

"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."

I don't think it's defeatism: I think the Dems realize that when (not if) Iraq resurrects itself, there are going to be a lot of people down on the Democrat plantation that will start wondering when it's gonna be THEIR turn.

If this goes into effect as planned in October, the GOP has just over a year to show just who was FOR it and who was AGAINST.

November 2006 should turn out to be a bloodbath for the Dems, with 2008 as possibly their last election as a party.


22 posted on 08/29/2005 2:15:56 PM PDT by decal ("The Republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: decal
If this goes into effect as planned in October, the GOP has just over a year to show just who was FOR it and who was AGAINST.

November 2006 should turn out to be a bloodbath for the Dems, with 2008 as possibly their last election as a party.

Let's not get manic. The MSM ain't going away, and it ain't turning Republican. The MSM will change the subject. They always change the subject from Republican success. Always.

Is Afghanistan a full-up democratic republic? Change the subject. Are Cindy's supporters outnumbered in Crawford? Change the subject. That is really the only constant in American politics - the MSM changes the subject whenever Republicans have the advantage.


23 posted on 08/29/2005 4:35:52 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters but PR.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-23 last

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.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson