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An opinion; my emphais; link below.
A weak constitution
By H.D.S. Greenway | September 2, 2005
DESPITE EFFORTS to put a good face on it, there is no masking America's failure to broker an Iraqi constitution that could unite the country. Indeed, the constitutional process so far has driven the country further apart.
President Bush called it a milestone in Iraq's history, but it is not the sort of milestone either he or his lieutenants envisioned when they took one of the biggest gambles in American foreign policy history: to use the tragedy of 9/11 as an excuse for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and presented no immediate threat to the United States.
Back then, the United States saw a united Iraq becoming a Western-style, secular democracy that would strengthen America's position in the Middle East in the years when oil production might start to decline. Now it looks as if the United States will have to settle for a fractured state in which the regions will go their own way, a state in which Islam will play a greater role than the United States wished or expected, with a Sunni insurgency that can only grow in power and intensity now that the Sunnis have seen there is little in the constitutional process for them.
It is not as if the Bush administration didn't try. First the United States tried to rig the January election in favor of pro-US and secular candidates. Then Condoleezza Rice winged off to Iraq last spring to demand that Shi'a and Kurdish leaders bring Sunnis into the constitutional tent. The president himself took the unusual, last minute step of calling a Shi'ite cleric, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, begging him to be more accommodating to Sunnis. And America's able ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, dropped the pretense of a hands-off, let-the-Iraqis-make-their-own-decisions policy to conduct last-minute, nonstop shuttle diplomacy to get a consensus more to America's liking -- all to no avail.
This failure was predictable, and perhaps inevitable, given the fragmentation of Iraqi society in which religious, regional, linguistic, ethnic, and tribal loyalties still trump the concept of a centralized Iraqi state. What could be kept together by Saddam Hussein's brutality could not by anything the United States was prepared to do.
When all was said and done, a federal system was bound to prevail over the strong, central government, which the Sunnis want, but the failure came with the inability to reach a compromise to which the Sunnis could willingly concede. Now only more violence is likely to follow.
Iraqis have been down this road before. Great Britain invaded what is now Iraq in World War I and set about to rescue it from the ''dead hand" of the Ottoman Empire. The cruel Turk and all his works were to be dismantled, and a new modern state, built along Western lines and ideals, was to follow. Few Britons knew anything about the land they were sent to transform, and those who did often could not agree. In the end, Iraqis complained that the British organic law ended up less liberal than the Turkish law it replaced.
And it is not just the Sunni insurgency that has to be worried about. In the Shi'a south, and even in the pro-American and relatively stable Kurdish north, factional militias enforce their brutal and ruthless will. Corruption is ever increasing. Thuggery abounds.
Americans at home see more clearly every day the tar pit the administration has led them into, where the bones of neoconservative misconceptions and hubris lie beside the administration's incompetence for future generations to contemplate.
''I want our folks to remember our own Constitution was not unanimously received," says President Bush in an entirely misleading comparison, as if the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia while the battle of Gettysburg still raged.
''Our nation has given so much to the Iraqi people, and what are they giving us in return? " asks Senator John Warner plaintively. But it is doubtful that a majority of Iraqis would say today that the Americans have given them more than they have lost, despite the viciousness of Saddam's dictatorship. The likelihood is, as with the British before, what most Iraqis really want is to be rid of us.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/02/a_weak_constitution/
A weak constitution
By H.D.S. Greenway | September 2, 2005
DESPITE EFFORTS to put a good face on it, there is no masking America's failure to broker an Iraqi constitution that could unite the country. Indeed, the constitutional process so far has driven the country further apart.
President Bush called it a milestone in Iraq's history, but it is not the sort of milestone either he or his lieutenants envisioned when they took one of the biggest gambles in American foreign policy history: to use the tragedy of 9/11 as an excuse for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and presented no immediate threat to the United States.
Back then, the United States saw a united Iraq becoming a Western-style, secular democracy that would strengthen America's position in the Middle East in the years when oil production might start to decline. Now it looks as if the United States will have to settle for a fractured state in which the regions will go their own way, a state in which Islam will play a greater role than the United States wished or expected, with a Sunni insurgency that can only grow in power and intensity now that the Sunnis have seen there is little in the constitutional process for them.
It is not as if the Bush administration didn't try. First the United States tried to rig the January election in favor of pro-US and secular candidates. Then Condoleezza Rice winged off to Iraq last spring to demand that Shi'a and Kurdish leaders bring Sunnis into the constitutional tent. The president himself took the unusual, last minute step of calling a Shi'ite cleric, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, begging him to be more accommodating to Sunnis. And America's able ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, dropped the pretense of a hands-off, let-the-Iraqis-make-their-own-decisions policy to conduct last-minute, nonstop shuttle diplomacy to get a consensus more to America's liking -- all to no avail.
This failure was predictable, and perhaps inevitable, given the fragmentation of Iraqi society in which religious, regional, linguistic, ethnic, and tribal loyalties still trump the concept of a centralized Iraqi state. What could be kept together by Saddam Hussein's brutality could not by anything the United States was prepared to do.
When all was said and done, a federal system was bound to prevail over the strong, central government, which the Sunnis want, but the failure came with the inability to reach a compromise to which the Sunnis could willingly concede. Now only more violence is likely to follow.
Iraqis have been down this road before. Great Britain invaded what is now Iraq in World War I and set about to rescue it from the ''dead hand" of the Ottoman Empire. The cruel Turk and all his works were to be dismantled, and a new modern state, built along Western lines and ideals, was to follow. Few Britons knew anything about the land they were sent to transform, and those who did often could not agree. In the end, Iraqis complained that the British organic law ended up less liberal than the Turkish law it replaced.
And it is not just the Sunni insurgency that has to be worried about. In the Shi'a south, and even in the pro-American and relatively stable Kurdish north, factional militias enforce their brutal and ruthless will. Corruption is ever increasing. Thuggery abounds.
Americans at home see more clearly every day the tar pit the administration has led them into, where the bones of neoconservative misconceptions and hubris lie beside the administration's incompetence for future generations to contemplate.
''I want our folks to remember our own Constitution was not unanimously received," says President Bush in an entirely misleading comparison, as if the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia while the battle of Gettysburg still raged.
''Our nation has given so much to the Iraqi people, and what are they giving us in return? " asks Senator John Warner plaintively. But it is doubtful that a majority of Iraqis would say today that the Americans have given them more than they have lost, despite the viciousness of Saddam's dictatorship. The likelihood is, as with the British before, what most Iraqis really want is to be rid of us.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/02/a_weak_constitution/
