Why I remain an optimist

Wednesday will not be the last terrible day for Baghdad, says Mark Steyn, but the new constitution is yet another step towards a happy ending

New Hampshire

The death of hundreds of Shia pilgrims in the most catastrophic single incident since the liberation of Iraq is not the timeliest occasion to be celebrating the country’s future. The mere rumour of a suicide bomber unleashed more horror than an actual bomber could have done. And so, even in the scale of its tragedy, Wednesday was symbolic of the limitations of the ‘resistance’: in the long run, the best they can hope to do is what happened on that bridge in northern Baghdad — panic the majority into stampeding to their doom.

The story of the last two-and-a-half years is that the Shia leadership, religious and political, has not been panicked, despite all the provocations. That’s still the best way to bet. The images on television from Baghdad, like most of the images each week, are ones of disaster and confusion. But the underlying story is of a nation inching, albeit in a messy two-steps-forwardone-back kind of way, through a steady transformation.

The latest stage is the new constitution, which is a much better document than its pre-publicity and certainly better than other recent attempts at constitution-making. The difference between the US and European constitutions was encapsulated in their opening words: on the one hand, ‘We the people... ’; on the other, ‘His Majesty The King of the Belgians... ’, followed by a whole phone book of obligatory namechecks — the President of the Czech Republic, Her Majesty The Queen of Denmark, Bob and Harvey at Miramax, my agent Bernie, etc.

If M. Giscard and his fantasist technocrats ever decide to have a second bite at the Euro-cherry, they might want to call in the drafters of the new Iraqi constitution as the rewrite guys. The Iraq version begins: ‘We the sons of Mesopotamia, land of the prophets, resting place of the holy imams, the leaders of civilisation and the creators of the alphabet, the cradle of arithmetic... ’.

Lovely stuff. The more I read the Iraqi document, the more it seems a marvel of sophistication and, indeed, cunning. Even with the inspirational uplift, it’s a shorter and sharper read than the now-deceased European constitution, and, unlike M. Giscard, the Baghdad boys understand that a constitution is about the division and limitation of powers. It’s true that an awful lot of states with fine-sounding constitutions don’t have constitutional government (China, for example) but, if that were the fate in store for Iraq, the proposed document would be full of a lot of meaningless boilerplate. Instead, in almost every clause you can feel the tightly argued bargains being struck. Here’s Article Two Section Three: ‘Iraq is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-sect country. It is part of the Islamic world and its Arab people are part of the Arab nation.’ That first sentence alone is a remarkable declaration for this part of the world and, if the second partly qualifies it, well, hold your horses before screaming Iranian-style theocracy. It was never likely, in Iraq as in Afghanistan, that an overwhelmingly Muslim country would not give formal recognition to that reality in its constitution, but what’s important here is what’s not said. Iraq ‘is part of the Islamic world’, but it’s not an ‘Islamic republic’, as Iran is. ‘Its Arab people are part of the Arab nation’, but Iraq itself is not: it’s not the ‘Arab Republic of Iraq’, as it is the ‘Arab Republic of Egypt’ and the ‘Syrian Arab Republic’.

These are significant differences in emphasis — which is why Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, has described the Iraqi constitution as ‘dangerous’ and a ‘recipe for chaos’. The Arab League, a typically devious creation of the British that just as typically backfired on them, is the bastion of the decayed cult of pan-Arabism, and Mr Moussa objects to what he regards as the denial of Iraq’s ‘Arab identity’. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? His very job is the embodiment of the ancien régime in the Middle East. Mr Moussa is the sultan of ‘stability’, the bizarre fetish the West’s realpolitik crowd prioritised over all else for half a century.

These days, what remains of Middle Eastern ‘stability’ finds its most loyal supporters on the Western Left. ‘I figure Iraq is about 74 per cent Arab,’ notes Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. ‘You could have called Iraq an Arab country with that profile.’ Sure, where’s the harm? And America is about 75 per cent white, but I can’t see Professor Cole being quite so blasé about declaring the United States a ‘white country’ or, better yet, an ‘Aryan Republic’ that’s part of the ‘Aryan Nation’.

Cole and Moussa are missing the point. Iraq is declaring that it’s not part of the ‘Arab nation’, at least not in the sense that Egypt, Libya and even Jordan are. It’s something else, something new. If you’d been asked in 2003 to construct an ideal constitution for Iraq’s very non-ideal circumstances, it would look something very much like this: a highly decentralised federation that accepts the reality that Iraq is a Muslim nation but which reserves political power for elected legislators, and divides the oil revenue fairly. But that’s easy for me to say. In practice, there’s no genuine federalism anywhere in the region. All Arab states are highly centralised — after all, if you were bothered about excessively centralised power, you wouldn’t be a dictator in the first place. But through the 1990s, under the protection of the Anglo-American nofly zones, the Kurds developed an embryo state with democratic institutions and, when they got to the negotiating table, they weren’t prepared to take a step backwards for the sake of sharing a country with a bunch of Shia theocrat wannabes and Sunni disaffected Saddamites.

So they hung tough. I predicted a couple of days after the fall of the Baath regime that the Kurds would settle for being Quebec or Scotland rather than Slovakia or East Timor. And so they have. But they’ve left the Scots in the dust. It’s not just that Arabic and Kurdish are the two official and equal languages, nor that Kurdistan will be free to write a constitution for its own region, but that they’ll also have full control over policing and security for their territory.

The Kurds drove a hard bargain and the Shia accepted it. The Sunnis did not. Sad, but not fatal. You wait around for unanimity, you wait for ever. The US framers said nine out of 13 states would be enough to proceed, and Rhode Island and North Carolina were still not on board at George Washington’s inauguration. Quebec, incidentally, has still not signed the Canadian constitution. The Americans want the Kurds and Shia to have one more go at schmoozing the Sunni, but the Kurds and Shia are less inclined, and who can blame them? Some of the Sunni representatives were Baathists negotiating in bad faith, and, of those who weren’t, two were murdered. Meanwhile, a lot of their con stituents seem to be having difficulty coming to terms with the fact that they’re a minority. I don’t mean psychological difficulty, but that they literally don’t comprehend the arithmetic. They form about 15 per cent of the population, less than the Kurds (also Sunni) at 20 per cent, but, having been selected as Iraq’s managerial class by the British and maintained in their privilege not only by homegrown Sunni dictators like Saddam but also by the Sunni dictators’ club at the Arab League, it’s not clear how many of them grasp their numerical weakness.

Yet Sunni intransigence pays diminishing returns. They boycotted the elections, but they happened anyway. They’ve refused to sign off on the draft constitution, but 88 per cent of Iraqis say they want to go ahead and hold the ratification vote. The longer they hold out, the more it’s the Sunni who’ll be divided as the savvier factions try to cut themselves in on the deal. Here, for example, is an interesting development in the Sunni Triangle from Tuesday’s Washington Post: ‘US warplanes backed Sunni Arab tribal fighters on Tuesday in what tribal leaders called an unprecedented Sunni-led offensive to drive out Abu Musab Zarkawi’s forces.’ There are still Sunnis happy to give Zarkawi and the head-hackers the run of the Triangle to bomb and kill, and there will be many who take pleasure in this week’s grim Shia corpse count. But not 100 per cent of them. And the longer their leaders refuse to acknowledge the realities of the new Iraq, the more the real split in Iraq will be within the Sunni.

That’s where the Shia acceptance of Kurdfriendly federalism comes in. The most intriguing article in the new constitution is number 116: ‘Every province or more has the right to establish a region’ — i.e., if the southern and eastern provinces wished to combine into a Shiastan, they’d be able to. Why would they want to? Well, it seems to me, after several readings of this very sophisticated document, that what’s cunning about it is that it’s not merely a constitution but also a pre-nup. The Kurds demanded federalism because they don’t want their already functioning state to be dragged down the toilet of history with the Sunni Triangle. If the Sunni don’t shape up, the Kurds will go their own way. In that case, would the Shia want to get stuck with the Sunni in what’s left of Iraq, or would they rather be shot of them, too? After this week’s death toll, that’s an even more pertinent question. The constitution provides a path for them effectively to ditch the Sunni and leave them with the slums of Baghdad and an oil-less slab of western desert.

There’s nothing wrong with the hardfought trade-offs of smoke-filled rooms: that’s what the US constitution is, and, come to that, Magna Carta. The flop constitutions, on the other hand, are those that reflect the modish unanimity of a homogeneous ruling class — like the European constitution. The Iraqi document is a very subtle instrument: it effectively uses Sunni intransigence to give the Shia majority an interest in Kurdish federalism — and, if in the end that doesn’t work, supplies the mechanism for 85 per cent of the Iraqi population not to get sucked down with the hold-outs. As the aerial TV shots of looters in New Orleans remind us, at defining moments not every citizen rises to the occasion. What matters is that enough do. The Iraqi constitution understands that.

The Western media would be doing us a favour if they did as those legislators in Baghdad have done and acknowledged the federal nature of Iraq. If the Shia are England and the Kurds are Scotland, the Sunni Triangle is Northern Ireland. Oh, and the Marsh Arabs are Wales, and their environmentally devastated marshlands, drained by Saddam in the early 1990s, are being ecologically restored — which you’d think might persuade at least the West’s enviro-lefties to support the liberation.

The point is that back when bombs were going off in Belfast and Derry, life was relatively pleasant in the rest of the United Kingdom except for the occasional sudden atrocity. Wednesday will not be the last terrible day Baghdad confronts, but the most savage eruptions will not, in the end, shift the country’s basic trajectory. I often say the glass in Iraq is two-thirds full, but that’s not quite right: it’s seven-ninths full. In 14 out of 18 provinces, life is as good as it’s ever been. The four provinces where stuff explodes are the ones with a significant Sunni presence — Anbar, Nineveh, Salahad-Din and Baghdad. That last is embarrassing, and it’s disgraceful that after two and a half years the greatest military power on the planet can’t secure the road from the Green Zone to the capital’s airport. On the other hand, Kurdistan has a brand-new international airport built in order to cope with its business and tourist boom.

In fact, let me go further than the glass being seven-ninths full: I think it’s very difficult now for Iraq to wind up with an unhappy ending. Whatever the ‘neocons’ got right or wrong, it’s not about the Americans any more, but the Iraqis, and they’re doing a pretty good job, even on the worst days, and one with great implications for Syria, Egypt and beyond. Amr Moussa is correct: the Iraqi constitution is a ‘recipe for chaos’ not for the Iraqis but for the Assads, Mubaraks and the rest of the old guard.