If all goes well, a draft constitution for Iraq will be presented to the National Assembly next week, ready to be pummeled by Western leftists for not being a blueprint for paradise. Howard Dean has already added to his stock of bizarrities by predicting that the position of women will be worse than under Saddam Hussein. He means, I suppose, that both sexes used to be equally oppressed, so that it will be a terrible thing if women’s liberty increases only 90 percent as much as men’s. We can anticipate many similar grumbles, as the new document undergoes severer scrutiny from foreigners than any other constitution in world history.
For Iraqis, a great deal hinges on the impression made on non-Iraqi commentators. A consensus that the new governing law is insufficiently progressive, democratic and secularist would give the European Union and others nostalgic for the Ba’athist regime an excuse to turn Free Iraq into a pariah state. There is also a risk that supporters of the country’s liberation will become disgruntled if the Iraqi Assembly fails to live up to their most optimistic hopes.
Nothing can be done to ameliorate the outcries of those who yearn for defeat and want America’s position in Iraq to unravel. The rest of us should, however, try to judge Iraqi efforts fairly. The first step toward doing so is looking at them right side up.
What is likely to attract the most attention is the proposed constitution’s declarations regarding the rights of citizens and the role of Islam. What will be most important, though, is how much power is allotted to the government and how it is distributed. The success of our own Bill of Rights leads Americans to forget how meaningless paper rights are if the structure of government gives monopoly power to a party or sect. The former Soviet constitution assured the people of manifold liberties, all of which were rendered illusory by the Communist Party’s dominant position. Similarly, Iran’s façade of elections means nothing, because a council of mullahs decides who can run for office and reserves the right to veto elected officials’ acts.
It will bother me little if the Iraqi constitution establishes Islam as the state religion and denies complete equality to women, so long as it provides for a popularly elected government, checks and balances to thwart excessive concentration of power, an independent judiciary and an economy free of state control. Polls and other evidence indicate that the great majority of Iraqis do not yearn for a retrograde Moslem state. So long as their preferences are able to shape what the government actually does, the Established Mosque will be as ineffectual as the Established Churches in contemporary Europe. Meanwhile, women and minorities will learn how to chip away at restrictions on their legal rights through alliances at the ballot box.
Constitution writing won’t solve Iraq’s problems, of course. Those are primarily the result of the war being waged against it by foreign terrorists and Ba’athist remnants, not-so-covertly supported by Syria and Iran. In a world in which it was less necessary to play public relations games to please the implacable lefty media, pro-freedom Iraqis would be devoting all their energies right now to pursuing victory, and would worry later about perfecting their form of government. Our own nation, let’s remember, muddled through most of the War for Independence under an ad hoc administration, adopted the unsatisfactory Articles of Confederation in 1781 and did not commence existence under the present Constitution until 1789, thirteen years after the Declaration of Independence. Iraq is somewhere past its Saratoga but has yet to reach its Yorktown. Let’s not demand that it progress too much faster than our own Founding Fathers.
Sir, Who caused 911?
It seems that a lot of people try to blame Bush for the fiasco of 911. Slick Willie was in power for 8 years and Bush for 8 months. If Clinton doesn't have a clue nor knew of the plottin and planning for 8 years how could Bush have known of it in 8 months? It seems that the Dems and Libs are trying to avoid the shabbiness and failure of American Intellligence under Clinton that created the worst disaster in American history. The Dems to forget that they nearly overthow Bush as soon as he was declared winner by the Electoral College. The campaign carried out by them with commercials, politcal lampooning, he sucks, racists propaganda, supposed disgraceful character , demeaning cartoons etc. All the while the terrorists were refining their plot under Clinton's misguided and sorely incompetent and fatally divided intelligence bureaus , an intelligence cut down by past Democrats by slashed funding, firing of agents, harrassing agents, isolation of various entities and a general dislike of the intelligence by people with marxist socialist and liberalist beliefs. The Dems seem to forget all this in their hatred for Bush.
Posted by: juven bachan | Wednesday, July 12, 2006 at 03:11 AM