Does the Big Bang fizzle over the Iraq constitution?
Tom Barnett
¦"Some Fear Iraq's Charter Will Erode Women's Rights," by James Glanz, New York Times, 8 August 2005, p. A6.
¦"God, Man, and the Common Weal: A great democratic experiment is taking place in Iraq," op-ed by Reuel Marc Gerecht, Wall Street Journal, 8 August 2005, p. A10.
Iraq under Saddam was reasonably secular: laws were based on Shariah but did not kow-tow to any extreme interpretations. In the current discussions on the new constituion, there are proposals galore and already some inserted wording that suggests sectarian and tribal interpretations of religious law may erode the position of women in society. Naturally progressive women are awfully worried about this, and so their protests are casting the current constitutional debates in a light surprising to some observers, but not so to others. In short, the most contentious items within Iraqi society, as well as between the political process and the American overseers, is all the social values stuff: love, marriage, family, sex, etc.
The scariest proposals basically say: let tribal sensibilities rule over the law when it comes to such sensitive matters. The upshot will be clear: women will suffer. Whenever clergy are given civil power, as one activist said, "We always lose our rights in religious courts."
How much should the U.S. intervene to prevent such outcomes? You let the system keep the women down and social and economic change will remain retarded, keeping serious democracy at bay. There are no democracies that treat women like minors-none.
This would be too big of a loss for the Big Bang process, but there's more hope than commonly realized, as Gerecht argues. The system of governances being put into place, so long as women retain the right to vote, should offer enough capacity for enduring compromises and that's the essential definition of democracy-including our own. Remember, our political system was built around what later proved to be a terrible compromise on slavery, which ensured a certain amount of internal strife for decades, ultimately leading to a severe civil war. If you give people the opportunity to rule themselves, things like this will happen. Authoritarian states war more often than mature democracies, but emerging democracies have the highest tendency toward war-they're the teenagers of political evolution.
So if you want democracy to spread in the Middle East, expect more and not less conflict in the mid-term. Like most good things in life, if you want them, you better be prepared for some suffering between now and the good stuff. It's a contentious process by design, and all the intransigence we're witnessing now in these debates, as Gerecht points out, simply shows how seriously Iraqis are taking this historic opportunity. |
