A dangerous sham

I have been very hard on The New York Times recently but I was glad to see that they recognized the Iraqi charter for what it is, a dangerous sham, and that they took the Bush administration to task.

Iraq's Unsettling Constitution

The draft constitution given to Iraq's national assembly last night does little to advance the prospects for a unified and peaceful Iraq. Nor does it reflect well on the Bush administration, which let its politically motivated obsession with an arbitrary deadline trump its responsibility to promote inclusiveness, women's rights and the rule of law.

The assembly's leadership sensibly decided to give itself a few more days to try to modify some of the badly flawed draft's more contentious provisions on federalism. Unfortunately that appeared to leave little room for the substantial changes needed in other divisive provisions, like the enshrinement of Islamic law and the threats to women's family and property rights.

The draft got to the assembly ahead of this latest deadline, a week later than Washington wanted, only by sidelining until almost the last moment the Sunni Arabs who had so painstakingly been added to the drafting group earlier this year. Since the Bush administration has promoted the constitution as a way to drain support from Sunni insurgents, this exclusionary move was reckless and indefensible.

I covered Bush's comments yesterday but I will repeat them here.

SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) -President George W. Bush on Monday said the development of an Iraqi constitution would be a landmark event both for that country and for the Middle East and said he believed the final document would reflect Iraqi values.

"The establishment of a democratic constitution will be a landmark event in the history of Iraq, in the history of the Middle East," Bush said in a speech to U.S. veterans.

He said all of Iraq's main ethnic and religious groups are working together on it and "made a courageous choice to join the political process and together they will produce a constitution that reflects the values and traditions of the Iraqi people."

The idiocy of this leaves me speechless.

This charter, at best, is going no where.

Approval by a simple majority of the parliament will be only a first step. The draft constitution will then be subject to a national referendum in October. Excluding the Sunnis from that decision won't be so easy. If at least two-thirds of the voters in three of the four Sunni-majority provinces reject the draft, it will not go into effect. Opposition in other provinces is also possible. Shiites in the central provinces near Baghdad, which also lack oil, are wary of federalism. Large numbers of women may turn out in defense of their threatened rights. Secular Iraqis from all regions could choke on the provisions reportedly declaring Iraq an Islamic state and prohibiting any legislation that conflicts with the fixed principles of Islam.

And at worst will further fuel the insurgency and result in civil war.