{"id":3587,"date":"2005-08-25T16:08:20","date_gmt":"2005-08-25T23:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/2005\/08\/25\/iraqs-constitution\/"},"modified":"2005-08-25T16:08:20","modified_gmt":"2005-08-25T23:08:20","slug":"iraqs-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/25\/iraqs-constitution\/","title":{"rendered":"Iraq’s Constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tIt seems to me that the story of Iraq’s constitution pretty well trumps everything else that’s going on the world these days as a new story, with all respect to the heroic Cindy Sheehan<\/a> and to snake-oil peddler Deepak Chopra<\/a>. Unfortunately, there’s not as much intelligent commentary as I’d like to see.<\/p>\n

The Left’s Iraq whiz, Juan Cole, is pretty mealy-mouthed about it,<\/a> relying on the New York Times to analyze it for him:<\/p>\n

\n

I don’t know how this very loose federal system will work, and the granting of the right to form provincial federations seems to me dangerous. And I have a sinking feeling that rigid interpretations of Islamic canon law may end up trumping some of the beautiful human rights otherwise promised.<\/p>\n

Back in the real world, all of Iraq’s petroleum production was knocked out on Monday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and changing the subject as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n

Michael Barone links opinion pieces from reliable sources<\/a>, David Brooks and the WSJ<\/a>, which wouldn’t be too persuasive to our dovish brethren on account of their reliance on ad hominem reasoning.<\/p>\n

The Brooks piece extensively quotes Bush critic Peter Galbraith, who’s unmistakably enthusiastic about the constitution<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

“The Bush administration finally did something right in brokering this constitution,” Galbraith exclaimed, then added: “This is the only possible deal that can bring stability. … I do believe it might save the country.”<\/p>\n

…Galbraith says he is frustrated with all the American critics who argue that the constitution divides the country. The country is already divided, he says, and drawing up a constitution that would artificially bind three divergent societies together would create only friction, violence and civil war. “It’s not a problem if a country breaks up, only if it breaks up violently,” Galbraith says. “Iraq wasn’t created by God. It was created by Winston Churchill.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It looks like a good deal to me, but I’m a crazy tin-foil hat wearing Bush-backer, so what do I know?<\/p>\n

My thought experiement goes something like this: suppose you had to write a new constitutiuon for the US today, which of course had to be acceptable to Red-state America (AKA “Jesusland”), Blue-state America (AKA “Air America Land”), and to the masses of moderates who live purple and free. Would it be much different from the document the Iraqis are developing?<\/p>\n

My guess is that it wouldn’t be.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems to me that the story of Iraq’s constitution pretty well trumps everything else that’s going on the world these days as a new story, with all respect to the heroic Cindy Sheehan and to snake-oil peddler Deepak Chopra. Unfortunately, there’s not as much intelligent commentary as I’d like to see. The Left’s Iraq … Continue reading “Iraq’s Constitution”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-VR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}