What 'Federalism' Is About-The Iraqi Constitution

[Annie]

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneblog/columns/barone_050825b.htm

Links at site.

Michael Barone's Blog

8/25/05
Constitution making

Excellent pieces of the proposed Iraqi constitution today—a column by David Brooks in the New York Times, and an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. Brooks points to the favorable opinions of Clinton administration Ambassador Peter Galbraith, who has worked hard for freedom for the Kurds for many years, and former CIA agent and American Enterprise Institute scholar Reuel Marc Gerecht, who knows Iraq well. Many in mainstream media profess to be fearful that the constitution will lead to theocracy in Iraq. Galbraith, who has been scathingly critical of the Bush administration on many counts, and Gerecht, who has been critical on occasion also, disagree.
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Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications — including the Economist and the New York Times.
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They make the point that Iraqis are not necessarily going to make the same constitutional and policy choices that Americans would. This is of course true of other democracies. Britain has an established Church of England, and the prime minister effectively (and the Queen formally) chooses the Archbishop of Canterbury. Canada provides public funding for Catholic and other religious schools. France bans girls from wearing headscarves in schools. Germany prohibits the publication of Nazi materials. We don't do any of these things, and most Americans wouldn't want to. But who would argue that Britain, Canada, France, and Germany are not acceptable representative democracies with acceptable levels of human rights? They just have different histories and different traditions, and have made different choices.

Some have argued that Iraq is a poor testing ground for democracy in the Middle East because it has multiple sects and ethnic groups—the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. But I think the multi-sect, multi-ethnic character of Iraq is actually helpful in forging an acceptable democracy. It forces constitution-makers to confront squarely the age-old dilemma of representative government, how to reconcile majority rule with minority rights. In a mono-ethnic, mono-sect state, or one in which one group is the overwhelming majority (Shiite Iran, Sunni Egypt), that issue doesn't necessarily present itself, and you risk getting the tyranny of the majority that our own Founding Fathers strove to prevent.

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[Annie]

http://patterico.com/2005/08/25/3507/a-modest-proposal/

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8/25/2005
A Modest Proposal
Filed under: War, Judiciary — Patterico @ 7:05 pm

Many have recently expressed concerns that the Iraqi constitution may overemphasize religion.

I believe I have the solution. Don’t worry about the language of the Iraqi constitution. The key to keeping the Iraqi government secular is constitutional interpretation.

I therefore propose that President Bush donate Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, and Breyer to Iraq, to be Justices of a new Iraqi Supreme Court. These Justices can be relied upon to secularize the Iraqi government, regardless of the actual language of the Iraqi constitution, or any traditions of religious observance in Iraqi public life.

We’d miss them, of course. But sometimes sacrifices must be made — for the greater good, you understand.
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