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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Steyn: New Iraqi constitution has something for everyone |
| 2005-08-29 |
| 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. and my state has two of the worst: Di Fi and dumb as a Boxer of rocks 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." bitchiness and cattiness on a high school level = NYT quality 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. LOL - Rep Squishes - so fitting.... |
| Posted by:Frank G |
| #6 It's pretty easy to knock on Di-Fi and Boxer but I ask you this: when was the last time the California Republican party ran a Senatorial candidate that was worth a damn? Not a nice guy -- Bill Jones was/is a nice guy -- but a hard-charging, tough, comes-out-swinging candidate? Not damn recently. You can't win if you don't fight. |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2005-08-29 20:21 |
| #5 Well Frank, you are bitching about people who don't believe in freedom here, so why should they believe freedom works in Iraq? Di-Fi and Boxie think like communists and act like strict overbearing parents to 30 million Californians. Why should they give a rats ass about Iraqis, they cant vote democrat. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2005-08-29 12:45 |
| #4 What gets me about all of this (and something I think should be emphasized) is that it took this country over 10 years to "get it right." Even then, we sidetracked hot issues (slavery) which ended up costing us thousands of lives to resolve the issue. Of course, I'm hesitant to give the MSM any ammo about how long it took us to get it right. |
| Posted by: BA 2005-08-29 08:20 |
| #3 Steyn is on target once more. The MSM attempts to set the bar so high that any outcome other than Jeffersonian democracy falls short. A constitution is a living document, both in terms of amendments over time and in terms of savings lives through a political process (over military). |
| Posted by: Captain America 2005-08-29 01:23 |
| #2 Frank, you'll enjoy this DiFi moment: From WashTimes: "The following letter, from the Family Research Council [FRC] to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, speaks for itself and deals with the California Democrat's claim last week that she represented 145 million women on issues such as abortion. "Could you clarify how you arrived at this number?" wrote Connie Mackey, vice president for government affairs, and Pia de Solenni, director for women's issues. "According to the 2003 American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 144,513,361 women and girls in the United States and, given our democratic environment and diverse society, we are confident in suggesting that the views of these women are not all represented by you. "California, the state you represent, has about 17.5 million women and girls," the women note. "If you are suggesting that you represent 145 million women because of your stance on Roe v. Wade, polls show that women are consistently becoming more pro-life. ... We look forward to the explanation of your statement." |
| Posted by: Captain America 2005-08-29 01:17 |
| #1 He's kind of right - these documents are not the product of chummy consensus - it's more like a knock-down drag-out fight, but conducted with words on paper instead of with weaponry, edged or otherwise. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-08-29 00:30 |