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COMMENTARY
August 27, 2005
Freedom, ever?
The writing of the Iraqi constitution is unquestionably the most important story currently in world news. Unfortunately for readers and editors alike, it is a complex, confusing, mess of a story, within which, as ever, what is urgent has drawn more attention than what is important. But on the successful establishment of a sound constitutional order for Iraq, depends every waning prospect for the future of the Middle East, and by extension for the peace of the world (at least insofar as it is threatened by “Islamism”).Democracy is nice, but the most important good -- not only in itself but for the prospect of peace -- is human freedom. It is a paradox that people who are not free, behave less responsibly than those who are. Not really a paradox, when you think it through: for the free man has more to lose. I am speaking of course of civic freedom; there is a deeper freedom that was taught by Christ, that can belong even to those who are outwardly prisoners or slaves. Yet from another angle, freedom is indivisible. The deeper and the shallower are linked. And it is on the good of religious freedom, that all civic freedoms ultimately depend. (It must be understood that religious freedom includes the civil right to have no religion. In this sense, the atheist must be accepted as having a religion, equally with a Muslim, Christian, or Jew. For the freedom is OF religion, not FROM religion.) Now, if a man -- in the old sense, including a woman -- cannot live, and raise his children, unmolested, in allegiance to what he most deeply and sincerely believes, what civic freedom has he? None. His “freedom of speech” and every other nominal freedom is meaningless, and his children have been kidnapped. This is why, in the Iraqi constitution, at heart, the phrase, “Islam is A source for our laws” is an acceptable preamble; but, “Islam is THE source” is not. And this is infinitely more important than who pockets the oil revenue. It is unfortunately at this precise point that Western “libertarian” arguments, themselves a product of Christian civilization though consistent in themselves, come face to face with a religion that has never previously accepted their premises. My sense in trying to follow the backstage manoeuvring over the constitution in Baghdad and Washington -- about which I have chosen not to write -- is not that the Shia delegates who insist on the priority of Sharia law have been negotiating in bad faith. (Let alone the Kurds, whose enthusiasm for Sharia is tepid at its warmest.) Rather, they are products of their civilization and language, and the nice Western distinctions necessary to create a civil order that can defend religious freedom, is only partially comprehended. They mean well, but can’t resist writing internal contradictions, honestly failing to grasp that a Sharia-based constitution is an imposition, not only on people who happen to be Assyrian Christian, but on Muslims who want the protection of civil courts from the vagaries of the mosque. Alas, the issue in Iraq that is catching the headlines is the effort to assuage the Sunnis, whose arguments reduce to the notion that any constitution acceptable to the majority Shia must, ipso facto, be unacceptable to them. The Sunni delegates, many of whom are former Baathist officials, are frankly not negotiating in good faith. They will accept neither majority rule, nor legitimate regional autonomies; and they demand a role in Iraqi government for men seriously tainted with the crimes of the former regime. Worse, if they turn out to be representative of the Sunni electorate, they will be able to block the new constitution, by getting a two-thirds vote against it in Sunni-populated districts. This is bad because almost any constitution will be better than no constitution. No constitution is what they have in Somalia. The Bush administration, which will always give American interests priority over Iraqi interests, wants the Sunnis assuaged because they are the principal source of the terror that is costing American lives, and preventing the U.S. military from withdrawing the forces that secure some degree of public order. But the problem of Sunni Islamist terrorism cannot be solved, without widening the field of military enterprise, to include regime change in the neighbouring countries that are feeding the insurgency for their own despicable ends -- principally Alawite-controlled Syria, and radical Shia-controlled Iran. And that, … is a very large distraction from matters of substance in the constitution itself. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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