Dean's World

I've been seeing discussion threads lately (such as on my lovely wife's site or at Michael Totten's place) comparing Iraq's new proposed Constitution to Iran. They keep pointing out that they have elections in Iran and that they have Islamic law there, and so what's the difference? Some even say, well they have corrupt elections in Iran and they'll be corrupt in Iraq too so same thing right?

I understand this confusion, but it's simply confusion. You have to know something about how Iran's government works to even think this is a remotely reasonable comparison. Let's examine how Iran's system of government works:

1) Iran is a Constitutional Republic--a non-democratic Republic.

2) It is ruled first and foremost by what their Constitution terms "The Supreme Leader." This man is not elected. Current holder of the office is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is the Commander In Chief of the armed forces, the head of all intelligence and security forces absolutely. He and he alone has the power to declare war. He also has the unilateral power to appoint or dismiss judges, has complete control over all television and radio networks, and controls many other important functions--and once again, his control over most of these things is absolute. He also controls half of the "Council of Guardians," a group that interprets the Iranian Constitution.

How does Supreme Leader--i.e. Dictator For Life--get his job? He is "elected" by:

2) The Assembly of Experts. This body is made up of 86 clerics--mullahs, ayatollahs--who are "elected" to 8 year terms of office. One says "elected" with trepidation, because they have to be widely recognized religious figures. Widely recognized by who? By other religious men. Basically, if you aren't in the Ayatollah Club, you don't get to be on this assembly. Furthermore, this "Assembly of Experts" has never once been known to either overrule or remove from office any Supreme Leader.

3) Who is the Council of Guardians? A group of 12 quasi-judges who have the ultimate authority for interpreting the Constitution. By law, half of them are appointed and keep their job at the whim of the Supreme Leader and are always clerics. The other half are appointed by the Parliament. Oh, there's a "Parliament?" Sure. Sort of.

4) Parliament: An assembled body that gets to vote on budgetary matters and treaties and a few related issues. All their decisions are subject to approval or rejection by the Council of Guardians--and nothing they do can overrule anything done by the Supreme Leader. Furthermore, only candidates approved by the Council of 12 are allowed to run for office--and in every "election" ever held, the vast majority of people who wanted to run for office were denied the right to do so.

5) The "President" - electected every four years. Must be approved by the Council of Guardians and the Supreme Leader. Handles day-to-day executive duties, with formal approval of the Supreme Leader for anything controversial.

In all of this, there is no free speech, there is no free press, and the only people allowed to run for any office are those approved by the Supreme Leader and the mullahs who run the entire show. People are routinely jailed for criticizing the government. Most government power resides in figures who have never been elected to anything, nor even appointed by truly elected officials.

Oh yeah, and most of the evidence shows that despite all this, massive vote fraud has been normal in every election, since the vast majority of Iranians, especially young ones, think the elections are a complete joke and a waste of time. No real reformer is ever allowed to even run for office, let alone be elected. So the mullahs appear to use a lot of ballot stuffing just to make turnout look much higher than it is.

To call all of this "democratic" or even comparable to what real elections look like is ridiculous.

Compare all of this to the new proposed Iraqi constitution: It guarantees free speech. It guarantees free press. It guarantees all Iraqis the right to vote. It guarantees all Iraqis the right to run for office. All authority is vested in elected officials, or people appointed and approved by elected officials.

Is it possible that Iraq will become like Iran, an Islamic Republic? "Possible" is a big word, but the only way it could possibly happen is if they shred the proposed Constitution, throw an unelected religious nut in as dictator, with a bunch of other religious nuts to rubber stamp most of his dictates, and say "sorry, we were joking about the whole democracy thing."

There are also those who say the new Iraqi Constitution will harm women. Unfortunately some are saying dumb things like women were better off under Saddam--uhm, no. Under Saddam, a woman might have her tongue cut out or her children murdered in front of her eyes for offending the regime. Saddam's regime used to cut women's heads off and force their families to display the severed heads in their front yards. To this day we are still digging up mass graves including the bodies of countless women buried with their children, bullet holes in all their heads. Please stop making dumb comparisons like this, it's just obscene.

It is entirely possible women will end up with the short end of the stick in the new Iraqi system--but if so, it will be by their own choice. All women will have the right to speak, the right to pubish, the right to vote, and the right to run for public office, none of which they had under Saddam (and please, let's not call phony shows where Saddam's the only guy on the ballot an "election"). They'll also have an absolute minimum of 25% of the elected seats--far more than we have in Congress here in the US. So if things aren't fair, they'll have had a voice in making it that way, and will have an opportunity to object and make changes.

I wouldn't worry much about it though--surveys of the Iraqi people show that only about 25% of them want strict, conservative religious rule. Most want some aspect of the national religion in government but want moderation and secularism too.

In any case, comparing any of this to what's going on in Iran is ridiculous. The most likely scenario instead is that the Iranians will look at all the freedoms their Iraqi brethren have and begin to wonder why they can't have all that too.