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August 20, 2005
Are We Rushing The Iraqi Constitution?
I wonder sometimes: is the US making a mistake in holding the Iraqi constitution writers' feet to the fire to keep them on schedule? Austin Bay's correspondent, writing as The Iraqi, points out that it took five years to create the first Iraqi royal constitution under the British, and that the Japanese under MacArthur took seven. The Iraqi concludes:
The big silent majority are trying to live day by day and hope for a better future; they lived for 50 years under temporary constitutions (AKA None) changed by will of tyrants. Federal Iraq? Fine with me, but no loopholes, no secession, one army, no lebanization, and Islam should be a source not the source.
Women and men should be treated equal unequivocally, no turnaround or ambiguous articles elsewhere.
I add my humble voice to the number of respectable Iraqi intellectuals www.elaph.com [in arabic--Jeff] who proposed a 5-year waiting period before writing a constitution, mean while we can still use the interim one.
As Austin Bay notes, his friend knows that his opinions are just that--opinions. But his ideas are provacative. After all, the interim constitution provides for a representative Iraqi government; it's not like Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority were still in charge. The whole point of this operation was to give Iraqis an effective government. I'd hate to see something less than ideal enacted just to give us Americans a nice tidy schedule.
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