Defeatism On Parade
Dean
Here's an amusing comparison:
First, there's this New York Times editorial waxing rhapsodic about how wonderful the Afghanistan Constitution is, written right after that exciting document's ratification.
Then, there's this wailing and teeth-gnashing New York Times editorial bemoaning how awful Iraq's proposed Constitution is, written just yesterday.
What do both Constitutions have in common? A lot, including equality for women, free speech, free press, universal franchise, guaranteed religious freedom, and saying that no law can go against either the principles of democracy and human rights or the principles of Islam.
You can have a look at the Afghan Constitution right here, and you can look at Iraq's proposed Constitution right here. The language of the two on this supposed issue of "theocracy" is quite similar--if anything, the Afghan constitution is more religious, even starting with the words "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate."
So what's the difference? What it looks like from here is that they want us to succeed in Afghanistan and so are positive about that document, but they want us to fail in Iraq and so are negative about that document.
It would be laughable if it weren't so deadly serious.
Alenda Lux has still more analysis on the matter.
(Hat tip: James Taranto.)
The big problem though with the draft Iraqi constitution is that it might not get approved. That is much more serious then the fine points about what it says.
I'd say there's a clear improvement there.
Ultimately the other questions about family law and whatnot will reside with the voters of Iraq.
And you think it's not clear? My God, man! The Constitution guarantees human rights. The Constitution guarantees that the legislature will be 25% female. Even ours doesn't do that!
I suggest you actually read the document before commenting on it.
I am not convinced that disolution is inevitable, but I do think it is likely. I am also not convinced that the Kurds are capable of claiming a state of their own. Perhaps they are doomed to the same role that the Basques have in Spain, or even Native Americans in the USA.
I can see a very realistic situation in which parts of western Iraq merge with Syria. But as long as the USA in actively engaged there, that possibility is also foreclosed.
The basic problem is that I can perceive no common rationale for the 3 main groups in Iraq to join together and form a common culture. Other than inertia, what is there to hold Iraq together?
Perhaps they can be like Canada with its French minority. The problem is that in Canada, that French minority effectively holds the rest of Canada hostage. I know. I lived there.
The Sunni and the Shia don't seem to like each other much, but then, honestly, it's far less intense from what I can see that the Catholics and the Protestants have been in Ireland--and that's a tension that's all but evaporated in the Republic, and only still goes full throttle in the northern counties, and is more a battle over secession than anything else. In the Republic, it's almost a dead issue.
Do the Shia particularly want to secede? Do the Sunnis? The Sunnis would have a very small nation if so, and would lose most of the oil revenue.
I would also remind people that the Kurds did have their own autonomous democratic government, but their leadership strongly pledged to support a united democratic Iraq before the invasion--one of the many things the White House managed to accomplish as part of its extensive pre-war planning (you know, those plans they supposedly never made). The Kurds also know full well that they'll have all sorts of trouble from the Turks if they try to go independent.
Can a multi-ethnic, multi-language nation work? Well Canada does work, faults and all. An even better example is India. Yes, they did splinter into four nations (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India) but the remaining nation of India is one of the world's largest nations, and has shown itself to be peaceful, prosperous, and economically vital. Yet it has fourteen official languages and many different ethnic groups. (SOURCE.) Its population and its economy are going great guns.
So, counter what Arnold Harris has said in other threads, no, having multiple ethnicities and languages is not an automatic recipe for dissolution.
The new Iraqi state will work so long as most of the people within it conclude that they have more to gain by hanging together than not. I think the Kurds know that with a federal government they'll be better off than striking out on their own. I think the Shia still resent the Sunnis but realize that giving up Baghdad and the three Sunni-dominated provinces would rob them of something vital. And the Sunnis damn well know that they'll lose everything if they splinter.
As someone more eloquent than me recently put it, democracy always looks like it's going to fall apart yet usually proves to be stable. The core reason being that most human beings would rather argue with each other than shoot each other.
The major problem with the Iraqi constitution is that many people are intellectually invested in failure in Iraq and therefore, anything will be viewed as failure. As the two links from the NY Times shows.
What's all this prove? Nothing, except that having multiple ethnicities and languages is not necessarily a country's undoing. Obviously it creates problems, but so long as the people see value in staying together, they stay together--Swiss national identity is quite fierce from everything I've heard.
US involvement in Afghanistan good, US involvement in Iraq not good.
I wasn't paying very close attention, as I had the TV on primarily for background noise, and was doing something else at the the time. But I wanted to point this out as there seems to be an undercurrent of this sentiment going around, and I don't get it.
BTW, the UN guy was also apparently a former terrorist from the 1970s. Or so he claimed.
What does that prove? I was only hightlighting it because people keep saying that Iraq is a made up country with three different nationalities and I wanted to show that's not without precedent.
People are bailing out because it's not Sweden yet.
Their constitution isn't even signed yet but it's already seen as a disaster. I read it at Der Komissar's site and I found much to like and much to dislike. My major problem is that it's almost a socialist's dream. There're 'rights' to health care, housing and work.
The devil will be in the details, but I sincerely doubt that the Iraqis will voluntarily allow a religious dictatorship to take over so the calls on Islam are for form and not function.
I know, I'm slurping the Bush kool-aid. I'll take that seriously from people who I've seen who have shown some sense of the difference between tactics and strategy and how strategy is supposed to drive tactics and not the other way around.
Switzerland and Belgium, which are examples of multiethnic, multilanguage counties that work, evolved over the last 1000 years of European history. A reoccurring theme in the Middle East is that countries like Iraq are artificial countries created by the British drawing arbitrary lines on a map, which is close to what the British did in 1922.
The question is has the last 80 years of the existence of the country of Iraq created enough of a nation identity that the people see themselves as Iraqi rather than Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds. There is considerable evidence that the Sunni – Shiite divide was blurring, with many families intermarrying. It is also clear that the Kurds, who were promised there own country of Kurdistan by the British in 1918 and then saw the British redraw the borders in 1922 dividing Kurdistan up between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria have not given up the idea of having a separate country. After essentially having a separate country for more than 10 years (actually the Kurds had 2 separate countries because they could not all agree among themselves), it seems unlikely that they are ever going to agree to anything more than some very lose federation with Iraq.
I agree with Dean in principal that it would not be a bad thing to dissolve parliament and hold new elections, with hopefully higher Sunni participation and start over again. The problem is that may only make the Iraq less stable in the short term.
Things like this are why I'm fairly optimistic.
While it is true, by the way, that Belgium and Switzerland evolved into their current configurations, India did not. It was arbitrarily created by the British in exactly the same manner that countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc. all were. And the Swiss, with their largely independent cantons, could have blown apart at any time over ethnic squabbles--they didn't because federalism works, and the people perceived that uniting for a common defense and currency and other items while maintaining local control over many others was in their natural self-interest.
By the way: Romansh is still an official language of Switzerland, but the people and its speakers have mostly disappeared due to assimilation. I believe that at the moment there are more German speakers there than Romansh, but Romansh remains one of the four official languages while German isn't. [shrug]