Asharq Alawsat (The Middle East), UK
Aug 19 2005

Iraq: A tactical Setback, A Strategic Gain

Amir Taheri
19/08/2005

Is the decision by the Iraqi National Assembly (parliament) to
postpone for a week its scheduled debate on a new draft constitution
“a major setback” for the newly liberated nation, a or just a bump on
the road to democratization?

There is no doubt that many who are nostalgic for the days of Saddam
Hussein had been hoping and praying that the 15 August deadline would
not be met. These are people who want Iraq to fail so that they could
prove that George W Bush and Tony Blair were wrong in toppling the
Ba’athist regime in Baghdad.

The postponement was a setback if only because this was the first
time that the new leadership was unable to meet a political deadline
it has fixed for itself. One cannot begrudge the opponents of the
liberation their unique moment of jubilation.

But if this was “a major setback”, as some dons of dilatory deeds
have claimed, why did Iraqi lawmakers broke into spontaneous applause
after they had voted to postpone the constitutional debate? Did they
know something that the serial filibusterers on Capitol Hill didn’t?

The answer is that while the postponement was a tactical setback for
the Iraqi lawmakers it represented a strategic advance for the
practice of democracy in the newly liberated country. The Iraqis
working on the draft resisted intense pressure from all quarters,
including Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, the Shiite top
cleric, and the US Ambassador to Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad, to brush
disagreements under the carpet and come up with “something.” They
were told to set aside the contentious issues and offer the assembly
the apple-tart and motherhood parts of their exercise.

But the drafters understood that the goal of the exercise could not
be making everybody happy for a brief moment. They understood that
the object of democracy is not to make everyone happy on every issue
every time. In fact, the opposite is often the case if only because
democratic decisions based on compromise as they are bound to be,
never fully satisfy anyone. What matters in democracy is that
everyone should feel happy about the way decisions are arrived at.

As far as the way decisions are made is concerned, the overwhelming
majority of Iraqis are happy. They know that the days when a
mustachioed despot could impose any constitution on them are gone,
hopefully for good. They also know that no single group can impose
its will on all others. More importantly, they know that if they
ignore the wishes of the people they wouldn’t be able to look their
neighbors in the face.

It is disingenuous to make much of the fact that the Iraqis have not
succeeded in writing a constitution in three months.

The physical act of writing a constitution is not difficult.

The late Ayatollah Khomeini asked one of his minions to translate the
constitution of the Fifth French Republic and then added a few
articles to enshrine his own despotic rule. The exercise took a few
days. The Pakistani military dictator Zia ul-Haq once told me that he
could write a new constitution “in a mater of weeks, if not days.”
General Douglas Macarthur is said to have assigned one of his
secretaries to write the Japanese Constitution, again in a matter of
days.

But the American “founding fathers” needed three years to write a
constitution which was, subsequently amended two dozen times.

And then remember that all “the founding fathers” were Christian
Protestant English gentlemen sharing the same ethnic, linguistic and
cultural background.

Iraq’s “founding fathers”, however, represent a complex mosaic of
ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities. The whole thing is
further complicated by the fact that five rival political coalitions,
representing some 60 different political parties- from the Communists
to the Islamists and passing by secularists and monarchists- are
involved in the writing of the constitution.

On top of all that the debate over the new constitution was widened
to involve virtually all Iraqis. Over 300 constitutional conferences
were held throughout the country, enabling some 50,000 people to
express the views of countless trade unions, cultural associations,
women’s organizations, human rights groups, guilds, tribal
leaderships and religious fraternities. An even broader debate took
place through the newly-born private media, including 150 newspapers,
dozens of talk-radio stations and half a dozen television channels.

Thus the exercise went far beyond a political task assigned to a
committee and developed into a nationwide course in politics, human
rights, civic duties, and public ethics. Many Iraqis discovered the
complexity of their society for the first time. They saw that Iraq
did not consist of the uniformed, mustachioed and gun-toting
individuals who marched in front of Saddam Hussein’s giant portraits
like so many robots.

“I didn’t know that we had a Luri minority,” a highly educated Iraqi
friend told me the other day.

“I had no idea that many Iraqi Kurds were Shiites,” another Iraqi
friend admitted.

Others discovered that there are Iraqi Turkmen, Yazidis, Assyrians,
Armenians, Chaldaeans, and Ahl-e-Haq in addition to a variety of
Kurds, Arab Sunnis and Arab Shiites. Iraq’s ethnic, linguistic and
religious diversity is further complicated by a rich array of
political and ideological sensibilities. On the left there are
Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, and Labour Party-style
social democrats. On the right there are Islamists of a dozen
different sensibilities. In the middle there are democrats,
republicans and liberals who aspire after a Western-style system.

Imposing a constitution on all these different strata at gunpoint may
be easy. Getting them to agree on one is less so.

Recently, The Americans took six months to appoint an Ambassador to
the United Nations, and, even then, failed to agree. So imagine if
the Americans were to write their constitution in the multicultural,
multi-ethnic and politically divided United States of today rather
than in the homogenous country it was two centuries ago.

There is no doubt that every political move in Iraq today should take
into account two factors: the fight against the terrorists, and the
need for an early end to the US-led coalition’s military presence.
The speedy introduction of a draft constitution would be helpful on
both accounts. But it would be wrong to see the drafting of the
constitution as nothing but a tactical move related to the war
against terrorism and the departure of the foreign troops.

While the Iraqis must work hard and fast to meet the new deadline
they have set for themselves, there is no need to sacrifice quality
to speed. The terrorists will continue killing the Iraqis with or
without a constitution but are ultimately doomed to defeat. The
departure of he foreign troops is equally inevitable, although it
could be speeded up through the Iraqi political process.

The constitutional debate has turned Iraq into a giant school for
democracy. A nation that had been terrorized into silence for more
than half a century is beginning to learn to talk, to debate and to
engage in polemics. People, who never thought anyone would bother
about their views, or whether they could have any views of their own,
are now beginning to discover the power that they could have as
individuals and groups in a democracy. The new political elite is
learning the art of negotiation, diversion and, yes, even
filibustering. In Iraq today the past is fighting the future. The
future is sure to win.