Why Iraq

Soon, God willing, there will be an Iraqi Constitution.

Usually, arab constitutions come about like this, according to Amir Taheri in the London Times:

A MAN SPORTING a ferocious moustache, and wearing a military uniform covered with medals, appears on television to address the nation as martial music plays in the background. “Brothers,” he shouts, “I have just written a new constitution for you to raise the flag of Arabism, destroy our enemies and march on to Jerusalem.”

This caricature depicts the way people in many Arab states, from Algeria to Yemen and passing by Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Syria and Iraq, have learnt about their new constitutions over the past six decades of military rule. So it was a novelty to witness Iraqis struggling in public to write a democratic constitution based on wideranging consultation and compromise.

Perhaps it will be a travesty of a mockery of a sham that imposes all the grotesqueries of islamic sharia "law."

In that case we'll know that not only is islam the problem but also that the people are irredeemable. Total War will then ultimately be our only option for survival.

But on the other hand, the islamic terrorists themselves are terrified of what might happen if Iraq succeeds. This is not a pundit on fox news talking, this is the strategists of al-Qaeda themselves:

Iraq is the ideal choice as a model of democratisation in the Arab world. It faces virtually all the problems that Arab states face, including the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the status of women and the role of the clergy. Success in Iraq could inflict a strategic defeat on all despotic ideo- logies in the region.

Soon after the liberation of Iraq in 2003, Yussuf al-Ayyeri, a chief theoretician of al-Qaeda, published a book entitled The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula after the Fall of Baghdad. In it, he designated Iraq as “the greatest battlefield of Islam against the infidel and its native allies”. Al-Ayyeri wrote: “It is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, its very survival, is American democracy. To allow Iraq to build would represent Islam’s biggest defeat since the loss of Andalusia.”

Shortly after 9/11, I was berated by some (former) lefty "friends", who denied the terrorists "hated our freedom", as the President summed it up. Yes, that simplifies a lot, but it is ultimately truthful. They sure hate the freedom of women. Instead, these ex-"friends" declared it was the fault of "our policies", which is code for "supporting Israel's right to exist."

All those on the left who are rooting for this project to fail just to spite Bush and the neocons are bad people who must be ostracized and made irrelevant. Debate the strategy and criticize the effort by all means -- that's vital -- but demand victory rather than withdrawal!

This is why all reactionary forces, from pan-Arabists to Islamists, and their sympathisers in the West, have united to prevent Iraq from succeeding. Iraq has become the litmus test of the success of the democratic experience in the region. There is no guarantee that it will succeed. But it is vital for everyone concerned that it does.

Indeed! Isn't this worth giving it a real chance?

This was the first time that Iraq, created as a state 84 years ago, was allowing its people to write a constitution. The first one, establishing monarchy in 1921, was written by the British. The second, in 1958, was the work of colonels who copied the Soviet model. Subsequent constitutions were written by the so-called Revolutionary Command Council of the Baath party with no popular input.

This time it was different. Talks on writing the new constitution started soon after liberation in 2003 with a series of town-hall-style meetings in which citizens could walk in and say their piece. For a nation terrorised into silence for half a century this was a moment of catharsis. The process was then formalised with the creation of a multiparty commission to come up with proposed drafts.

For months the shaping of a new constitution has been the theme of popular political debates throughout Iraq. More than 300 conferences were held on the subject throughout the country, allowing an estimated 50,000 people to express the views of countless cultural associations, trade unions, guilds, tribal groups and religious fraternities. Iraq’s newly created free media, including more than 150 newspapers and six television stations, almost all privately owned, have brought the debate to every home in the country.

And yet this is how the seditious MSM works against us:

The terrorist campaign [aided by the media! -- RDS] has obscured the immense successes that the Iraqis have achieved. The most important of these is the destruction of the physical edifice of despotism and the slow but steady crumbling of its intellectual and moral infrastructure.

It's gotten so bad, even the AP is beginning to notice how biased they themselves are:

Rosemary Goudreau, the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune, has received the same e-mail message a dozen times over the last year.

“Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq?” the anonymous polemic asks, in part. “Did you know that 3,100 schools have been renovated?”

“Of course we didn’t know!” the message concludes. “Our media doesn’t tell us!”

Ms. Goudreau’s newspaper, like most dailies in America, relies largely on The Associated Press for its coverage of the Iraq war. So she finally forwarded the e-mail message to Mike Silverman, managing editor of The A.P., asking if there was a way to check these assertions and to put them into context. Like many other journalists, Mr. Silverman had also received a copy of the message.

Ms. Goudreau’s query prompted an unusual discussion last month in New York at a regular meeting of editors whose newspapers are members of The Associated Press. Some editors expressed concern that a kind of bunker mentality was preventing reporters in Iraq from getting out and explaining the bigger picture beyond the daily death tolls.

“The bottom-line question was, people wanted to know if we’re making progress in Iraq,” Ms. Goudreau said, and the A.P. articles were not helping to answer that question…

John Wilkes Booth could have been referring to the MSM when he gasped, cryptically, with his dying breath, "Useless! Useless!"