Like Water Flowing Downhill
Well, more like a glacier maybe, but the natural convergence of values in liberal Israel and liberalizing Iraq continues:
Here’s a story you don’t see very often. Iraq’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.
That’s not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can’t imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel — and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.
The only other Mideast country where one would expect dissent to be tolerated that way is… Israel.
In the case of Iraq, though, the federal high court, in a unanimous decision, vacated the Parliament’s rescinding of Alusi’s immunity, with the decision delivered personally by Chief Justice Medhat al-Mahmoud. The decision explained that although a 1950s-era law made traveling to Israel a crime punishable by death, Iraq’s new Constitution establishes freedom to travel. Therefore the Parliament’s move was “illegal and unconstitutional because the current Constitution does not prevent citizens from traveling to any country in the world,” Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar, spokesman for the court, told The Associated Press. The judgment even made the Parliament speaker responsible for the expenses of the court and the defense counsel!
(Via Ace)
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3 comments
Rather ironic that Thomas Friedman manages to spin this as something great Obama’s done, and basically says without admitting it that if Obama and the Democratic Party just embrace the Neocon agenda on Iraq it would be a wonderful thing for the country, the world, and their party.
Part of me says he’s too smart not to know what he’s really saying, because he wants to sell Democrats on the idea. That’s the only reason I’m going to try not being extremely sarcastic. If the goal is to follow through on our commitment to Iraq and on reshaping, over the long hard slog of time, our strategic relationship with an area badly suffering from lack of freedoms, then, we do what it takes to get that goal accomplished.
Ronald Reagan had a sign on his desk that said something to the effect of "it is amazing what a man can get done in this world if he doesn’t care who gets the credit."
If Obama and his party do the right thing on Iraq and get all the immediate glory for it, let ‘em. History will be the real judge anyway.
Yeah, I just shake my head at some of the spin out there. Even on straight news stories I’m seeeing versions of "Obama wanted timelines for withdrawal when the country was falling into civil war, and now the security situation is good enough for everyone to agree on timelines, so this vindicates Obama."
You know if we were to just embrace and nurture democracy in Iraq, that might, just might, establish for us a sane and stable ally in the Middle East and be the beginnings of a reshaping of the entire region toward greater freedom and human rights that’s also much less likely to produce radical terrorism.
A new administration requires new visions. Obama would be brilliant and courageous to embrace such an innovative and forward-looking agenda.
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