Federalism

Billmon has an interesting post about the Iraqi constitution. He says

But even taking the analogy at face value, the objectives sought by the dominant parties in Iraq are the opposite -- in almost every way -- of those pursued by the majority of the delegates in Philadelphia.

Our framers sought a solution to the seemingly intractable problems of a weak, decentralized confederacy of semi-independent states: precisely the kind of government the ruling coalition of Kurds and Shi'a Islamists now want to create in Iraq, with the apparent blessing of the Cheney administration. What the American founders feared most -- the decomposition of the union into three or four mutually hostile regional confederacies -- is now the official goal of U.S. policy.

But while the US and Iraq are both examples of failed experiments of Brittish colonialism, the similarities end there. Our Founding Fathers had all agreed on at least a basic philosopical framework, found in the Declaration Of Independence. By the time of writing the Constitution they were, for the most part, hammering out the details of how best to accomplish what was really the worlds first true secular republic. Of course there were arguments about how much power was to be concentrated in the federal government and how much should be relegated to the states. Those arguments still exist today. But even before that they had already agreed on the whole inalianble rights thing.

The Iraqis who are actually sitting at that table are not the same philosophers and politicians who had thrown in their lots together at the start of a revolution. They are representatives of factions who have a history of antagonism and are not even free to negotiate because at the end of the day, they have to answer to their camps. They have all been thrown into this convention after all spending decades in exile, each coming up with their own conflicting Project For A New Iraqi Century.

Billmon makes another good point when he says

Federalism and anti-federalism, as everyone at the time understood the terms, applied to the American states as pollitical entities, not ethnic or religious ones. There was no group comparable to the Kurds in 1787 -- i.e. a separatist national minority demanding an autonomous region drawn along ethnic lines. (Not unless you count the native Americans, and nobody invited them to Philadelphia.) Nor was there a huge religious majority insisting on the right to set up its own state-within-the-state, like the Shi'a parties are now.

The identity of a North Carolinian or a New Yorker were nearly as strong as the centuries old tribal distinctions of a Sunni or Kurd. This illustrates modern conservaties pathological inabilty to contextualize. As much as they talk about the Constitution In Exile, what they're really doing refusing to admit that what they have is simply an interpritation of the Constitution. When you try to translate a governing document like that from a pre-industrial society to a post-industrial society, it's not as simple of taking a literal reading. That doesn't work in every instance and so there's times when it is necessary to squeeze parts of the Constitution to fit situations that the framers couldn't have anticipated. They do the same thing with the Bible. They refuse to accept that any other interpretation than theirs is legitimate, becuase they claim to know the intent behind those documents. Of course, concidering that these are the same people who named the Clear Skies initiative, for example, I can't say that's too comforting.

Okay, so I'm rambling. It's late. Basically, what I'm saying is that these guys constantly try to overlay their view of current political and social issues over historical situations where there may be no real parallels. And now they're creating this cognitive feed-back loop by trying to take their fucked up version of history and apply it to Iraq!

But the radical Republicans do need to really watch what's going on there now (and I mean the real news, not just the Pentagon press-releases). Because the real corallary here is not America 1786 but America 2005. The religious right spends millions of dollars a year trying to impose their version of Religion on the US, and as Iraq is proving right now, theocracys just don't work in such heterogenious societies because you'll never be able to consolidate enough power to impose your version of the Koran (or the New Testiment) over that many people with opposing views.

So is it even worth the effort and innevitable bloodshed to keep a united Iraq? It was cobbled together by the Brittish a hundred years ago, and since we're looking for historical analogies right now, look at Yugoslavia. It was an attempt to unite peoples that didn't really have a historical or even a practical reason for being tied together as one country, and it almost seems inevitable that that ended in bloody civil war because once you lose an over-bearing totalitarian character such as Saddam Hussein or Josiph Tito then you end up with warring factions fight over limited resources.