Thank you for NOT unnecessarily excerpting this article.
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?
Thank you for NOT unnecessarily excerpting this article.bttt
bttt
"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.
He spelled "megillah" wrong.
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?
"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.