Artículo de DAVID BROOKS en “The New York Times” del 07.10.2003
Imagine if James Madison and the other Founding Fathers had tried to write a constitution while carriages were being blown up on the roads from Boston to Philadelphia. Imagine if, instead of holding their debates in complete secrecy, they had been forced to conduct them in the full glare of the global media. Imagine if they had been forced to write that document while America's neighbors worked to ensure their failure.
If you can imagine those things, you can begin to understand how difficult it is going to be for Iraqis to write their constitution. And yet, so far, things are going pretty well.
The Iraqis are only laying the groundwork for a constitutional convention, but there is already broad agreement on what the constitution should do. It should establish a democratic government, protect minority rights, guarantee the equality of all people (including women) and establish a government that is consistent with Islamic values without being subservient to theocratic law.
Things are also going well because while Americans are making most of the decisions about how Iraq is run now, they are not dominating the constitution-writing process. "It has to be an Iraqi product," a senior Bush administration official insists. And the key Iraqis, especially among the Kurds and Shiites, are sophisticated players, willing to compromise and careful not to abuse one another as they jockey for power. As Noah Feldman, a law professor who served as an independent consultant on the process, observes, people in the Middle East don't always act rationally. But in this case they are, and all sides understand that if the talks fail, the result is mutual assured destruction.
Still, gigantic issues remain:
• Federalism: Should the Iraqis aim for a centralized presidential system or a loose parliamentary one? Most groups, including the Kurds, who are the best organized, call for decentralized government, but they are open-minded about which federalist model — the Swiss? the German? — would fit Iraq best.
• Boundary drawing: The U.S. constitution took separate states and unified them. The Iraqi constitution has to draw state boundaries. That's tricky because many areas are claimed by different ethnic groups.
• Affirmative action: Should the constitution set aside specific numbers of parliamentary seats for key minority groups, as in Kurdistan? Should the constitution contain explicit formulas to guarantee that no one group dominates national institutions? At the moment, there is a danger that the quickly reconstituted military could be Sunni-dominated, which would be disastrous.
• Social issues: There is some feeling that the constitution should punt on thorny social issues, like divorce and alcohol sales, leaving them up to local governments. That seems sensible; Israel doesn't even have a constitution in part because Israelis can't agree on the role of religious law. On the other hand, many women are concerned that local governments will allow things like polygamy and honor killings.
• Oil: "Oil is the brooding presence over everything," Feldman says. Divvying up the oil profits is not strictly a constitutional issue, but everybody will remain tense until it is resolved.
• Sunni leadership: The Sunnis in the Governing Council, handpicked by the Americans, do not represent the Sunni population. If most Sunnis are not invested in this process, they will feel tempted to play the spoiler role, and the Shiites and Kurds will be even more inclined to gang up on them.
• Democratic literacy: Iraqis want democracy, but many don't know what it is. Many don't realize you can have a town meeting without scripting it all in advance. Eleana Gordon runs democracy seminars in Iraq for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. This is tremendously important, and Gordon pleads for the U.S. to spend more on education. She finds that most Iraqis don't understand, for example, the need for a Bill of Rights to protect against a tyranny of the majority, and have lavish expectations for democracy.
There's no way the Iraqis can resolve these issues within six months, the deadline Colin Powell once set. But this process is the ballgame. Washington will continue to get distracted by microscandals about leaks and such, but the Iraqi constitutional process is the most important thing that will be happening in the world in the next year. If it succeeds, Iraq really will be a beacon of freedom in the Middle East. The Americans who have died in Iraq will have given their lives in a truly noble cause.