Real Kato Blog: The Sunni Side of the Street

Man, those Iraqis are having a tough time with that Constitution thing.

From what I've seen of the proposed Iraqi Constitution, it's a mess.

They want to have a government that's a democratic republic but also federalist. They want to ensure that laws fall with Islamic doctrine but also uphold democratic principles and equal rights. They're trying to use words that appease everyone, but in doing so, I think they're setting themselves up for decades of ambiguity and conflict.

And the Sunni Muslims are gonna get screwed. To some degree, they deserve it, because they boycotted the initial elections in droves, and thus are poorly represented in the parliament. Democracy's a bitch sometimes.

The conventional wisdom is that having a confederation (with essentially separate Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish states) is a bad idea. I'm somewhat ambivalent on that point. It's tempting to throw up borders between different people to try to avoid conflict, but I suppose that conflict always comes up anyway, as long as the groups are all in close proximity. There'll be territorial disputes and economic jealousy and power struggles... and the different peoples will never really be separated. And what's more, it probably increases the chance that one state will go rogue and turn into another Saddam-style dictatorship. Perhaps having all the groups in one country will help them moderate each other.

In related news... it turns out that soldiers killed in the Iraq war are getting phrases like "Operation Enduring Freedom" placed on their gravestones, based on the particular mission they were fighting when they died. Now, this is supposed to be an optional thing that the families can request. But in some cases, the phrases are going on without the families' permission, leading some to speculate that this is a subtle propaganda ploy by the Bush administration.

If it's really optional, can families request alternate phrases... like "Operation Iraqi Quagmire"? "Unjustified War"? "Political Pawn"? That would make things interesting.

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