Iraq has a draft constitution

Sunday the Iraqi majority Shiite tired of trying to meet the minority Sunni half way on the draft Iraqi Constitution and sent the draft to the Iraqi people for ratification. Reasonable Shiites discovered trying to give the Sunni everything they wanted was like making a Christmas list with an eight year old. You always run out of paper before the eight year old runs out of gift giving ideas. So the Shiite made a good faith effort, did the best they could, and sent the draft to the people.

By comparison, though the Treaty of Paris wasn’t signed until January 1784, hostilities in our own revolution ended in February 1783. At that time we were governed under the Articles of Confederation. It wasn’t until May 1787 that the Constitutional Convention opened. On 17 September, 1787, more than eleven years after we declared our independence, our draft constitution was sent to Congress and we reached the point that the Iraqis reached Sunday a little more than two years after their independence from Saddam. It would take almost another year for the requisite nine states to ratify our Constitution something the Iraqis hope to do in a little more than a month. Even if the Iraqis reject the current draft in October, they will still be well ahead of our own experiment with democracy.

There has been much made of the fact that the Iraqi draft constitution does not protect all the rights of women. Some sink into deep hyperbole screeching that Iraqi women were actually better off under Saddam. That is if you count being raped by Saddam’s two lunatic sons, or having your family shoved into a ditch and shot as being better off. The Iraqi draft calls for 25% of representatives to be women an odd thing to put into your constitution if you’re interested in repressing women. By comparison, our own constitution contained a provision for slavery until the 13th Amendment was passed in December 1865. Women were also denied voting rights until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920. So again the Iraqis seem to be tracking better than our own founding fathers.

We can count on the Lamestream Media missing these points as they loop endlessly the latest explosions in Baghdad from day to day. In October when Iraqis go to vote you can count on every shot and bomb being given more attention than the actual vote. When the vote is done, if the draft fails, the LSM will portray it as the end of Iraq and all Bush’s fault rather than what it would actually represent - a victory as for democracy in that the voice of the people had been heard. If the draft passes, the LSM will manage to minimize the accomplishment by continuing to endlessly loop the latest explosion in Baghdad.