Two-Thirds Full

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.

The New York Sun

The constitutional wrangling in Baghdad is par for the course in Iraq’s nation-building – as 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. We were told that Iraqi women were better off under Saddam, though the wags in 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% 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 under the American constitution, in the United States Senate 14% of the seats are held by women.


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 lamp-post 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 November 7th 2001, The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd was sneering at the Northern Alliance for being a lot of useless lay about deadbeats. “They smoke and complain more than they fight,” she scoffed. A couple of days later, Kabul fell so swiftly that on November 14th Ms Dowd switched smoothly – with only the mildest case of columnar whiplash – to whining that the hitherto lay about Northern Alliance had “embarrassed” us with their “savage force”.


That’s the way our Iraqi allies work, too. They have to be nudged along – which is why the US 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 horse trades, frozen in time.” The English-speaking world’s most significant and enduring constitutional settlements – Magna Carta, the US 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: thus, the much ballyhooed European Union constitution, for example, was dead on arrival. By contrast, the document on offer 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 which reserves political power for elected legislators – and divides the oil revenue fairly.


And if it doesn’t work? Well, that’s what the Sunni 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 and 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 one million new cars on the road since 2003, a statistic which no doubt just lost us warhawks the 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 US media, Democrat blowhards like Senator Joe Biden and Republican squishes like Senator Chuck Hagel is just as well.


The New York Sun

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