From yesterday’s New York Times:
Iraqi leaders said they had also reached a tentative agreement to relegate marriage and family matters to adjudication by clerics, an arrangement opposed by secular leaders and women’s groups here, Iraqi leaders said.
The tentative agreements on Islam were brokered by the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, according to a Kurdish negotiator who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the delicacy of the talks. The Kurdish leader said that in both cases, Mr. Khalilzad had sided with Shiite leaders in backing a more expansive role for Islam. That, the Kurd said, angered many of the secular-minded Iraqis who have been fighting for a stricter separation between Islam and the state.
According to the Kurdish leader, the secular Iraqis had pushed for language that would have narrowed the circumstances under which legislation would be deemed to be in conflict with Islam. And, according to the Kurd, the secular Iraqis had wanted marriage and family disputes to be adjudicated by civil courts, not by clerics.
“Your American ambassador is giving an Islamic character to the state,” the Kurdish leader said. “You spent all this money and all this blood to bring an Islamic republic here.”
(So why did the oh-so-liberal Times bury this deep in a story about the assassination of 3 Sunni election workers, where almost no one will see it?)
Pam’s House Blend is on this story, as well (and probably many others).
What is there to say, really? We came, we conquered, we screwed over women’s rights, and soon we’ll declare the whole thing a victory and leave them to their religious fundimentalist tyranny.
I think that screwing over women’s rights is actually an example of the Bush administration bowing to reality.
I very seriously doubt that the feminist and pro-secular government Iraqis make up a majority of the population, particularly in the Shiite regions that we are strongly allied with. The fact of the matter is, if we are going to avoid a nasty Shiite insurrection to go with the Sunni one, we may have to make concessions like this.
The neocons always wanted to portray Iraq as a nation of progressives and to claim that the vasst majority of Iraqis favored separation of mosque and state. We heard all sorts of polls and quotes supposedly confirming that.
I think what this reveals is that in reality, the majority of Iraqis are not classical liberals, and that they have no intention of emulating western secular values.
The neocons will try to deny their mistake by claiming that no, no, the vast majority of Iraqis are classical liberals, they want secular democracy, women’s rights, etc., but the EVIL state department sold them out to a small minority of misogynists and fundamentalists. No, they were right all along about Iraq, but were betrayed by the evil state department.
But in reality, the neos were lying all along, and the only hope of an Iraq with liberal values is if we heavily intervene to install them. In other words, if we want women’s rights and secular government in Iraq, our military is going to have to enforce them – probably with twice as many troops as we have now, and with a lot more ruthlessness. We are not going to get women’s rights in Iraq through gentle persuasion.
Barry, Naomi Klein described this months ago as “women for oil”.
Glaivester
>I think what this reveals is that in reality, the majority of Iraqis are not classical liberals, and that they have no intention of emulating western secular values.
Not quite that simple. I doubt that public opinion in Iraq is going to be thrilled with the depth of represssion that follows, any more than Iranians were. We have created a situation where Islamic fundamentalists of various stripes constitute most of the actual political actors – that is political forces with guns.
How can they make decisions about legislation when there isn’t even a constitution?
Krupskaya, they’re deciding the scope of the federal government as part of the constitution-writing process.
It will be easy enough to tell if Glaivester is right; the constitution goes up for a vote, and if the people don’t approve of it, it won’t pass. If the National Assembly accepts it, it goes to the people between now and 10/15; it requires a majority of the popular vote to be ratified, and can’t be rejected by 2/3 of the voters in 3+ provinces.
I have linked to this discussion on my blog if anyone is interested in seeing more of my thoughts.
My predictions about the neocons blaming the state department appear to be borne out here and here (thanks to Clark Stooksbury for the links).
I’m less than hopeful here.
This is the Kuwaiti model and 1991 payback. The people of Iraq are going to pay an expensive cost. Khalilzad was our ambassador to Afghanistan. He has a political history regarding theocracy even before he came an American citizen. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist judges weren’t clerics, which I imagine is the reason for Shi’a support of this measure, but the US has decided that the Iraqi people ought to most of all stop complaining. Kurdistan has given in on its wish for independence, which has not happened without US pressure. Separation of mosque and state on the American model has been rejected also, and would have been very worthwhile because of what bin Laden and the like want. They want a caliphate, which means one king of all Muslims, everywhere, in a state in permanent combat with the “infidel” until it rules the planet Earth. Saddam Hussein was not a religious fanatic as much as an Arabian fascist.
Iraqis want their rights. With Saddam Hussein in the brig, though, it’s worth asking who is really our opponent and what the organization is. Bin Laden doesn’t talk about Iraq, or we’d be told daily on the news, probably. Zarqawi and so on are number two men. Who is the number one man in the Iraqi Resistance of National Kamikaze, and why don’t we know it?
Women in Iraq are trying.
“Who is the number one man in the Iraqi Resistance of National Kamikaze, and why don’t we know it?”
There is no number one man. There is no “resistance” in the sense of a single organized entity.
What we have are a number of different people who want us out, all of whom are willing to to attack our troops in order to achieve the goal. There may be some coordination, but I do not believe that there is a “number one” in charge of the whole insurgency.
What I’m wondering about is, what happens if this thing gets voted down? After all, there seems to be plenty to dislike from my own viewpoint. What happens if enough Iraqis look at this and, for numerous reasons, vote against it?
I realize that the process says that a Provisional Government will continue to run things while another draft is created for approval. But if this process was going on in America, there would be poll after poll on the various drafts, and the Constitutional delegates would be trying to model the document to fit the poll results. Here, various factions are trying to get their ideas into the document and I don’t see evidence of any concern that the public may just vote this sucker down. I realize that in the Middle East (with the exception of Israel) the rulers have never had to concern themselves with public opinion. Maybe they just have to go through a cycle of writing this and having it rejected before they start taking the public’s opinion into consideration.
I wonder if anyone, either on the U.S. side or the Iraqi side, is planning for “What happens if this thing gets voted down?” Someone had better start managing expectatins so that such an occurrence won’t seem like the end of the world.