Dose of Reality
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
On Saturday, Iraq’s borders will close, street traffic will come to a halt in the capital, and Iraqis will vote for a constitution they will likely not even have read. The vote will go forward even though the country’s saboteurs have stepped up car bombings, roadside explosions, and attacks on civilians. Meanwhile, America’s ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, has succeeded in his last-minute negotiations to entice Sunni Arab leaders to urge their communities to support the draft national charter with the promise it will be amended later.
It’s tempting to embrace these developments. After all, Iraq looked grim before last January’s elections, but that vote managed to move forward anyway. And President Bush and most of Iraq’s leaders have praised the draft as a model for the region. The hope is that the last minute deal with the Iraqi Islamic party will give this document – and the government it will anchor – the legitimacy to enlist Sunni Arabs in the fight for the country.
One can hope. But it would be a mistake not to see the potential pitfalls this political strategy presents for the future of Iraq. To start, it’s not clear for whom the Sunni Arab representatives brought into Mr. Khalilzad’s negotiations speak. The State Department and CIA scuttled their plans to establish outreach offices in the Sunni Arab geographic areas shortly after the first wave of terror began in 2003. “They never established reporting bases inside the Sunni community or an effective outreach program,” a former CIA officer and American Enterprise Institute scholar, Ruel Marc Gerecht, said.
What a future Iraqi government will do with the constitution once it comes into power is also still an open question. That government will most likely be dominated by Shiite parties, and already there are credible reports from Basra and the southern part of the country that Iranian-allied Shiite militias have practiced vigilante justice at random against regional minorities despite the plea from the senior Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, to avoid such acts of vengeance.
It’s also unclear how the constitution will eventually be amended. For months, the Iraqi Islamist Party and other groups brought into constitutional negotiations fought to reverse the emancipation of Kurds and Shiites that the liberation made possible. They sought language eliminating the ban on senior Baathist officials joining the government, for example, and challenged protections for regional provinces to run their own affairs. If these issues could not be resolved over the summer, what is to say they will be resolved next year?
This is not to say that it would not be nice if Iraqis amended the constitution at some point to eliminate the dangerous clause stating that no law may contradict Islam. No less an authority on Iraqi democracy than an Iraqi author, Kanan Makiya, has warned that the draft constitution is a “patently unworkable document.” This is from a man who drafted the first federalist constitution for Iraq’s opposition in 1992 and 1993. Last week at the American Enterprise Institute, he warned that it was so vague in parts as to encourage “fratricide.”
But it does point to a deeper problem that will face Iraq even if the constitution is ratified this weekend, a problem resulting from the circumstances under which the document was drafted. “The process that led up to the constitution, including the text and the negotiations, has by and large not worked in the way that is often being portrayed,” Mr. Makiya said Wednesday in an interview. He believes it was folly to even negotiate the legal framework of a new Iraq to guarantee the rights of its people during a war whose outcome will determine that very possibility. “Right now we need the government to focus singularly on fighting the insurgency.”
These are not the words of a disgruntled intelligence official or an enraged American Democrat. Mr. Makiya is in many ways the conscience of the movement that challenged America to take responsibility for the nightmare of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He represents the best hopes of those who still believe that it is not only possible but necessary for the free world to defend the universal application of its freedoms.
Mr. Makiya’s message is best viewed not as disheartening nay-saying but as an important dose of reality. This weekend’s vote and the constitution that voters might approve aren’t panaceas. It is a dangerous illusion to think political processes alone will cure what ails Iraq. Those fighting the elected government have proven over and again that they seek the destruction of politics itself. They attack aspiring policemen and aid workers, they threaten voters and judges, and destroy power lines and water treatment plants. There is no point in negotiating with these kinds of people before the moment they surrender.
elake@nysun.com