Iraq Constitution Update
Dean
Austin Bay notes the perspective of an Iraqi friend on the proposed new Constitution. Not bad, but his friend gets at least one detail wrong: the Japanese Constitution was written almost completely by Americans, mostly Douglas MacArthur and his staff, and was forced down Japanese throats whether they wanted it or not. It was put into force in 1947, only two years after the war.
In the Iraqi process, the stated goal before we went in was democracy, and the stated plan for the occupation was to assist the Iraqis in holding elections and to create their own Constitution.
That was the plan all along? Yes, of course it was. It was part of the occupation plans that were worked on for about a year before we went in--plans which ran hundreds of pages and with a proposed budget in the tens of billions of dollars, despite whatever bullcrap you may have heard about "we had no plans." Those plans, created with substantial congressional input and approval, and with the help of expatriate Iraqis, from day one called on the U.S. to let the Iraqis do as much of the work as possible in shaping their own new government.
Now here we are two and a half years later, and the press is, without the least bit of irony, suggesting the Americans will be to blame if Islam has too big a role in the new government.
In other words, instead of acting like unilateralist cowboys ramming our values down the Iraqi people's throats, we let them elect people who would construct their Constitution, and now if we don't like everything in that Constitution, it's our fault.
For some people the US can never win. Me? Three years ago I said, repeatedly, that if the best we could ever hope for from the new Iraqi government was a state that looked like modern Pakistan, it would be a huge improvement. I wanted much better, but I'd settle for that. Today I see no reason to change that assessment.
That said: the press has routinely proven itself incapable of reporting with any nuance or sanity on the goings-on in Iraq, so I'm going to keep a "wait and see" on this latest kerfuffle over "the role of Islam" that has so many people in a lather. The pitched battle right now is whether their new Constitution will say that Islam is "a" source of their laws, or "the" source, with stipulation either way that democracy and minority rights will be protected.
I can't get worked up about this. Especially because I see no reason to believe that the Iraqi people will ratify a constitution that a majority of them strongly disagree with.
Someone wake me when they have something finished.
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Not every country believes in separation of church and state. Lots of them get along fine as free democracies. Great Britain, for instance.
Some people have no feel for how democracy actually works.
How about we at least set the bar at a Kuwait? Pakistan is a very bad country.
When I said that back in 2002, Pakistan was one of the freer nations of the world--Freedom House listed them as Partly Free. At the time, Musharaaf had been doing things to substantially democratize his country, to the point where Pakistan had recently been re-admitted to the British Commonwealth because of its strides toward restoring democracy. Pakistan had also been friendly to the US and other Western powers, and was cooperating fully in efforts to round up and imprison or kill terrorists, and had been crucial in helping us take out the Taliban.
By comparison, Freedom House rated Iraq as one of the least-free nations on Earth. It was ruled by a mass-murdering thug orders of magnitude worse than Musharaaf, was deeply involved in international terrorism, and was guilty of countless other crimes including firing on US and British forces, attempting to assassinate a former US President, mass gassing of its own population, and so on.
If you were contemplating the possibility of taking out Saddam in 2002, what would YOUR criterion for success be? My view was that we should do our very best, but if something like Pakistan was the best we could do, it would have been worth it. Better? Something like Indonesia. Better? India. Better still? South Korea. Better still? Japan. And so on and so forth.
By the way, Kuwait? That would also be an improvement, although the thought of installing a ruling royal family such as they have there would be pretty questionable in my mind.
In any case: most of what happens now depends on the Iraqis. I have no problem at all with pressuring them to make a choice, but ultimately it *is* their choice.
Dean Esmay's position here is and has always been consistent with his premises as he has stated them frequently here in Dean's World: 1) Democracy (universal suffrage, majority rule) is good (at least as long as free speech is allowed), 2) Muslims/Islam are good, therefore, 3) If the majority of voters in Iraq want to vote in an Islamic government such as Michael Reynolds described, fine and dandy. I disagree on all counts, but at least Dean is consistent.
Those in the media who are now taking a position to the Right of (i.e., more pro-Western than) President Bush's present policy only shows how inconsistent, contradictory, pragmatic, and shallow the media are. Obviously, their sole concern is to get more Democrats elected in the next election and, to that end, any stick, even one borrowed from the Right or the Far Right, is good enough to beat a Republican President.
To the extent that any of them have any deeper ideology than that, it is only a fifth-carbon Marxist premise that corporations, assumed to be the ruling force in the Bush administration, are evil.
The totalitarian Politically Correct Leftists in the universities, who are actually at the bottom rather than on the left in the 2-dimensional spectrum I am now using, are more consistent. They will continue to argue that: 1) Islam is good (because it is anti-Western), 2) Our Western civilization is evil, therfore, 3) We Westerners must not dare to impose our evil values on Iraq or any other Muslim nation. We must let them go the way of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, and if they then send terrorists over here to convert us to Islam through another 9/11, we have no right to object or else we are "racists".
My position, which is diametrically opposite, is also consistent: 1) Polytheistic Godliness, Selfishness, Sexiness are the absolute and supreme good, 2) Our Western civilization is as close to an absolute good as is we have yet come in a world still darkened by Akhenaton's blasphemies, 3) Islam, being an abrogation of these values and historically an enemy of the West, is not good, 4) We have no way of knowing how many Muslims today are good (i.e., pro-Western) or not, and we dare not take any chances, 5) The only tolerable form of government is a Constitutional monarchy or republic which recognizes individual rights to life, liberty, and property, therefore 6) If the majority of voters in Iraq or any other predominantly Muslim nation want to vote for a government that violates the rights of individuals within their nation and/or which is hostile to the West, then we must take whatever military action is necessary to stop them, including use of nuclear weapons if necessary. I am a Politically Incorrect Western Imperialist Warmonger -- proudly.
My criterion for success is what Mr. Bush has talked about: a representative democracy that protects the rights of minorities, allows for the free practice of religion, provides equality for women, provides for a free and open exchange of political views, respects the rule of law and empties the torture chambers.
I don't recall Mr. Bush justifying the war by suggesting we'd end up with a military dictatorship that proliferates nukes, practices torture, hosts hundreds of schools promoting violent anti-Americanism and routinely treats women as several steps below cattle.
Little databit about Pakistan: rape counselors advise victims not to report the crime because if they do they are very likely to be raped by the police. Then they'll be expected to commit suicide.
For the record I have been saying from the start that we should do just what we did with Japan: write them a constitution and shove it right down their throats. We turned Tojo's Japan into modern Japan and Nazi Germany into modern Germany and now we're going to turn Iraq into Paskistan and call it success?
I have to believe Condi and her people are aiming a bit higher than that.
"For the record I have been saying from the start that we should do just what we did with Japan: write them a constitution and shove it right down their throats. We turned Tojo's Japan into modern Japan and Nazi Germany into modern Germany and now we're going to turn Iraq into Paskistan and call it success?"
Excellent!
In fact, women were better off even in Tojo's Japan and Nazi Germany than they are in Muslim Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, or Saudi Arabia. Those nations are our sworn enemies and we must deal with them as such.
We have the weapons (indeed, we have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the entire population of this planet several times over if need be, as the nuclear-freezers themselves keep pointing out). All we need is the will to use them. What we need are leaders who honor women rather than rapists, freedom rather than slavery, our Western Catholic-style civilization rather than our Muslim enemies.
We must do to the Muslims what we did to the Japanese. Tell all the Muslims to stop raping and mutilating their women or else we'll shove an H-Bomb down their throats.
I did not say we are going to "turn Iraq into Pakistan" by the way -- I said that if we could get a state that looks something like Pakistan it would be a disappointment, but still better than what came before. Which it inarguably would be.
You've been saying from the beginning that we should impose a Constitution on them and not be dithering about with letting them write their own Constitution, eh? I'm tempted to ask you to demonstrate that, but I'll take your word for it. It might have been the better idea. But then again, it might not. It looks like we'll never know for sure.
At the moment, it is up to the Iraqis. All we can do is do our best to support and encourage them.
It will be a disappointment if the new Iraq doesn't recognize a right of return for Iraqi Jews, or doesn't enshrine gay rights into law, or doesn't give women 100% of the rights of men, or any of a host of other things we might wish to see.
The ultimate question is whether the new Iraq will be objectively and measurably more free, and less dangerous, than what came before. Which I'm sure we all agree is the ultimate goal, no?
The manner in which all levels of Japanese society from hightest to lowest totally surrendered to the power of the United States was exactly what they had expected of our forces in the Phillipine islands and the British forces in Malaya when they surrendered. No less than total submission to the conqueror. Except, of course, we treated conquered Japanese society much better than they had treated either the conquered Americans, British, Filipinos or Malayans.
In any case, they would have accepted more or less any form of government and accompanying constitution that MacArthur had put before them, so long as at least the ceremonial role of the emperor as the chief personage of Japanese society was left untouched.
And that was exactly the way MacArthur, one of the most experienced proconsular type high officers who had ever served the United States, handled the situation. He was one of the first American soldiers who flew in to Japan aboard an unarmed transport aircraft shortly after the surrender. He knew not only that he would be treated as an honored guest, but that he would be treated with the highest possible dignities.
His first night in occupied Japan was spent in one of the better Tokyo hotels left standing after the extensive bombings which had only recently ceased. He and his small staff were treated to fine steak dinners and slept in the best suite in the hotel. He was in fact an already imperial personage. He knew it, and his new Japanese subjecs knew it, and the Japanese were and are a people who know their exact place in a hierarchy and who also respect such hierarchies as part of their way of life.
One of the first large group of American soldiers that had landed marched down the roads with Japanese soldiers at stiff attention on each side, facing outward as a sign that they were now servants of Douglas MacArthur, shogun of Japan. Of course, the soldiers were shortly disarmed.
But there was neither resistance of any kind or even any sort of hostility. The wartime government had propagandized to them that our "barbarian western hordes" would rape their women and slaughter their children. And that perhaps was what they feared and expected. MacArthur as a matter of fact kept tight discipline among US troops stationed on the Japanese islands. And friendship between occupier and occupied grew rapidly and even fervently.
The fact was, all this represented another sea change in Japanese history and even Japanese culture. Which, to their everlasting credit, are characteristics of the Japanese nation itself. Once a major change is announced and is seen to have the backing of the emperor or his chief officers, the entire society cooperates in effectuating the change. For the Japanese, General MacArthur and his American proconsulate in Tokyo were nothing less than a new Meiji revolution of the 20th century. And the fact is, the Japanese have benefited greatly from each such massive change in their history.
And the history of the past 60 years has clearly shown that the cultural and administrative changes introducted to Japan under the MacArthur proconsulate not only have stood the test of time, but have outlasted most other constitutions around the world.
So well done, Mac. You proved you would have served as a fine president of the United States; perhaps as a better US president than as a US general. There were few men in the history of this country who made a greater impact than you, over a lifetime of military service and statesmanship.
And had you served as Japan's emperor and not merely as Japan's shogun for the six years you spent there, you probably would have been recorded as one of the better such personages in Japanese history.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Sure it is. Immediate perfection or total failure: that's the standard to which we are held.
Isn't it funny how atheists, freed from the supposed shackles of religious guilt, proceed immediately to inventing non-religious guilt to replace it? Instead of the calm, practical eye to "leaving it better than when we came" that one might expect from a doctrine that has no concept of Original Sin, we have this fear that we won't turn Iraq into France in three short years, and that failure to do so will mean total failure forever.
I suppose we were all disappointed in the nasty government of such liberated areas as South Korea and Chile, too. And with good reason. But tell me which half of Korea is better off today: the half that felt it too much to admit any flaw, or the one that started low and worked to improve themselves.
Had we used these assets wisely earlier, we might have avoided this situation.
They accepted it because we nuked and firebombed them into submission, with the promise of more if they didn't submit. Had we nuked and firebombed the Sunnis, they'd probably be more accepting right now too. But that would be terribly inhumane.