Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Iraq constitution

There has been a lot of hype lately on the MSM about Iraq becoming another Iran, its constitution being based on a fundamentalist view of Islam and so on. No doubt it is all part of the same negative reporting we have been seeing for years.

Luckily for me, I read one of the few intelligent newspapers in Europe (il Foglio) that prefers informed and documented analyses to easy alarmism.

I was further comforted by Micheal Ledeen's comment on The Corner:

First, there is hardly a country in the region without some language acknowledging Sharia as either "the" or "a major" basis for national legislation. But Iran, for example, says that Allah is the sole source of authority, while the Iraqi constitution says that the people are the only legitimate source of authority. This in itself is a revolutionary event.

The new constitution makes Iraq a Federal Republic, NOT an "Arab Republic," which is again revolutionary. And the federal nature of the new republic is revolutionary for the whole region.
My favorite newspaper, il Foglio, comments: "All the neighboring countries (Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia) and also more distant ones (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria) have trouble facing the spread of a democratic Iraq, of a Constitution born from true multiparty elections, and now a new innovation has been added: the...decentralization of power."

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