Joe Conason (Salon): Iraq's unhealthy constitution

[Jack Rabbit]

From Salon.com (Subscription or Day Pass Required)
Dated Friday August 26

Iraq's unhealthy constitution
The Bush administration's desperate insistence on an instant Iraqi constitution hurts both Iraq and our broader national interests. But when your polls are falling and you need to declare victory, who cares?
By Joe Conason

Attempting to reassure everyone about the troubled drafting of a new Iraqi constitution, Bush officials often mention the tumultuous early years of the new American republic. The problems faced by the Iraqis, according to the president, the secretary of defense, and the State Department spokesman, somehow parallel those that the founders overcame in writing our own Constitution.

Such comparisons are misleading, not only in the specific provisions of two very different documents, but also in the intentions of their authors. Perhaps the most important distinction, for the moment, is that as America's founders sought to create the charter for a new nation -- indeed, a new kind of nation -- they were not working under the pressured political schedule of an impatient occupying power.

Only after a decade of post-revolutionary confederation did the leaders of the former American colonies convene to write a constitution for the new United States. Despite their regional, political and economic differences, the founders were united in their determination to codify independence and liberty after freeing themselves from the British monarchy (as well as in their cultural homogeneity) -- yet the writing of the Constitution was attended by vituperative debate. Suspicions and fears forestalled complete ratification for more than two years.

Read more.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Big difference: our Founders WANTED to draft and ratify a Constitution.

They didn't have to, and with no pushing from a third-party occupier.

[emulatorloo]

2. Another snip worth reading

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By rushing the constitution, the U.S. may well have foreclosed the most plausible means for ending the ongoing violence in Iraq: namely, a cease-fire and negotiations between the interim government (with its American sponsor) and the indigenous Sunni insurgents -- believed to constitute the majority of the problem -- and their greater network of sympathizers and supporters across Iraq. Those negotiations might have achieved reasonable guarantees to the Sunnis about their own future status and an orderly timetable for withdrawal of American and other foreign military forces.

At some point after the Sunnis had been induced to lay down their weapons and participate in civil society, they might have joined with other Iraqis in devising a widely accepted constitution. Instead, operating under orders to meet an artificial White House deadline, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has reportedly pushed "compromises" concerning federalism, oil revenues, Islamic law, and other provisions that are exacerbating conflict.

The terrible irony, of course, is that this flawed process has badly damaged broader American interests in Iraq and the Mideast. Having been forced to choose among the Iraqi factions, we have assisted the Shiite factions aligned with Iran and advanced the cause of Islamism in southern and central Iraq.

Should civil war break out in the wake of a constitutional debacle, the withdrawal of American troops will become more difficult and more dangerous -- and the prospect of Iraq ending up as a failed state and an international base for Islamist terror far more likely.

Had the U.S. government really wanted to help Iraq transform itself into a new kind of nation in the Middle East, the political and constitutional process would have developed according to the real lessons of our past and that country's best interest -- and not been shaped to suit the political dictates of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. They have served our democratic ideals very poorly in Iraq -- and along with the Iraqis we may now reap the consequences of their stupidity.

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