What a difference a ‘constitution’ makes?

Mumia Abu-Jamal

With the proposed constitutional voting out of the way, the nation’s president and the press are calling for celebrations, suggesting that Iraq, battered, beaten, all but broken Iraq, is on the yellow brick road to “democracy.”

Forget, for a second, the nonsense about “democracy,” as if it is a lily that can be planted in desert soil, but the legalistic, word-infested, daze with which Americans treat the subject of “constitutions” leads many folks to think that once words are written on paper, the deed is almost done.

That is the thinking of many in this business-oriented contract culture: paper equates to power, and what is written becomes real.

But Iraq threatens to prove that paper is, after all, just paper.

And some observers are seeing, not “democracy” on the horizon, but the harrowing specter of civil war.

Much American commentary is spent on the claim that the Iraqi military is beginning to shoulder its burden of defending the country. There is one serious problem with that claim, and that’s that no such national military exists.

What exists, according to former U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith, is an assortment of regional and essentially ethnic militias. Galbraith, writing in a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, argues:

“In this deeply divided country, people are loyal to their community but not to Iraq, and the army reflects these divisions. Of the 115 army battalions, 60 are made up of Shiites and located in southern Iraq, 45 are Sunni Arab and located in the Sunni governates, and nine Kurdish peshmerga, although they are officially described as the part of the Iraqi Army stationed in Kurdistan. There is exactly one mixed battalion (with troops contributed from the armed forces of the main political parties) and it is in Baghdad ... Kurdistan law prohibits the deployment of the Iraqi army within Kurdistan without permission of the Kurdistan National Assembly.” [Peter Gal braith, “Last Chance for Iraq”, *NYROB* (10/6/05), p. 22.]

Oh—the so-called “constitution”? It insures the autonomy of the regions, and separate states. The central government isn’t central at all. In Iraq, it’s “all power to the provinces.”

Galbraith cites U.S. military sources for the fear that a civil war is imminent.

Months ago, I wrote that the alleged elections are virtually irrelevant.

I’ve found no reason to change that view.

The idea of “nation” differs from one religious community to another. What holds them together, just barely, is the memory of a nation-state. For some, that memory was one of dread. For others, Iraq was a place of glory.

And as there are different memories, some negative, some positive, these forces are pulling together, and pulling apart.

The idea of “nation” is slippery, illusive, ever-changing.

In time, perhaps in a surprisingly short time, there may be two, or three Iraqs. A Shi’a Iraq; a Sunni Iraq; and an Iraqi-Kurd homeland.

Without question, U.S. “national interests” (meaning “oil”) will come from one of them (or perhaps all of them).

A nation under foreign occupation isn’t really a nation, after all; it’s a colony.

It doesn’t make the really big decisions; those decisions are made for them by the occupying power. That’s the very definition of “empire.”

An empire, in order to be an empire, must have colonies.

If you think the Americans aren’t calling the shots in Iraq, you’re tripping!

They can talk about the Prime Minister and prattle on about the “constitution”; after all is said and done, Iraq is a state in the grip of a foreign power: the Americans.

Nations are taken over for the good of the conqueror; never the conquered!

Iraq is no exception.