Iraqi Constitution: a Formula for Civil War

The Iraqi Constitution as described by the press is most likely destined for failure.  Unlike our Constitution, they are being urged to build racial and religious differences into a document that should be designed to bring their country together and rise above these differences.  Instead they are institutionalizing these great divides at the encouragement of our government.  Both the Kurdish and the Sunni delegations have said that our Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has pushed for incorporating Islamic Law into their Constitution in order to meet the artificial deadline for completion of the document imposed by the Bush Administration.

To be successful a Constitution needs to unite a nation, not divide it into separate fractions.  In our case the Founding Fathers (ordinary men that did an extraordinary job) were able to come together to create a document that has truly stood the test of time.  In the case of the Iraqi Constitution they are apparently being pushed to create a document that will codify in to civil law the most extreme views of the various religious fractions because it suits the Bush administrations time line.  To any student of history this is a recognizable formula for failure.

America did not get it right the first time, it took us over ten years to create what is arguably the best Constitution ever produced.  The Articles of Confederation written during the Revolutionary War loosely coupled the 13 Colonies and did not provide the needed foundation for a successful government.  Even our Founding Fathers, while writing the final draft of our Constitution made a poor compromise on the issue of slavery, which seventy years later, took a civil war to resolve.

Regrettably it looks like the Constitution that is being created by Iraq, corrupted by Bush administration meddling for the sake of expediency, will generate a similar outcome; a civil war to resolve their religious and racial differences (in a lot less than seventy years).  The most likely outcome is that Iraq will eventually break up into three confrontational nations which will continue to be a breeding ground for terrorist and exacerbate the unrest in the region if they are not allowed to write the document they say they want.

Steve McGourty

August 21, 2005