Democracy on the march?

US deeply involved in suppression of Iraq ethnic groups opposed to neoliberal constitution

Through a series of deadly operations throughout Iraq west of Baghdad with catchy names like ``Iron Fist'' and ``Saratoga'', the US military has been for over one month cleaning out the provinces of Iraq most likely to reject the neoliberal constitutional process now being imposed on the country.

It is easy for these named operations to be promoted as ``protection'' for people:

In north-central Iraq, Iraqi security forces and U.S. Task Force Liberty soldiers began Operation Saratoga in advance of the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum and to protect people during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Officials said Iraqi forces and Task Force Liberty soldiers will be much more visible across all the regions of north-central Iraq to act on recent information developed by the Iraqi police and army and coalition forces.

But many posts by the essential Juan Cole have cast much doubt on the military happy talk surrounding its ops. and the Constitution. Here, Cole describes how people living in the areas now under US attack perceive the Americans and sense what they will lose in the constitutional process:

In recent months, the Sunni Arabs came to feel that the new constitution deeply disadvantaged them, and it occurred to them they might be able to deploy the 3-province veto, themselves. They became galvanized at the thought that they might be able to derail the accursed constitution invented by the Kurdish warlords and Shiite ayatollahs to deprive them of their fair share of Iraq's resources. This mobilization of Sunnis to vote in the referendum was even cited by Washington's Iraq boosters as a positive sign! But as with all the hype of the boosters, their balloon has been shot down only a couple of weeks after they came up with their glib talking points. It was never very likely that the Sunnis could have derailed the constitution at the polls, though it was just possible if they could have gotten out enough votes in Ninevah (Mosul). Now, having watched their country taken over by foreigners, watched their women humiliated with foreign troops searching their underwear drawers, having watched their army dissolved, their relatives fired from government jobs in the tens of thousands, they have even been explicitly informed that they are not as good as the Kurds (who would never have put up with their own 3-province veto being subjected to a stealth veto if they had not liked the new constitution). (For a glimpse of what educated, middle class young Sunni Arab women think of the constitution, see Riverbend).

As for the hidden, underlying purposes of the current American operations (shrouded in newspeak and propaganda), I do not think we should dismiss the strong editorial opinion given by Robert Knight on the KPFA Flashpoints program last night:

DENNIS BERNSTEIN: Robert, this is a very important analysis and story, reporting you have just put together for us. Let's just very quickly sum this up. In essence, we're seeing sort of a textbook disinformation campaign to that which you're accusing the others of doing.

ROBERT KNIGHT: Oh, it's magnificent the way which newspeak is being applied for this anti-democratic military operation of the Bush administration in Iraq. Not everybody is falling for it. For instance the Iraqi member of Parliament Mashaan al-Jaburi said today, ``What we fear most in the governance that contain mixed residence is the targeting of Sunni Arab neighborhoods -- in order to prevent Sunnis from attaining the 2/3 of the consensus required to vote down the Constitution at the referendum.''

Key provisions of the proposed Iraqi Constitution
For a detailed examination of what I am talking about, please take a look at what you almost never see in media -- a discussion of the evolution of the actual document Iraqis will be expected to vote on next weekend. Find it here at Foreign Policy in Focus. In this piece, Herbert Docena lays out how most Iraqis, even American collaborators, wanted to, ``at least on paper, to build a Scandinavian-type welfare system in the Arabian desert, with Iraq’s vast oil wealth to be spent upholding every Iraqi’s right to education, health care, housing, and other social services.''

The Americans have other ideas.

Tragic process
How has this tragic Iraqi constitutional process been run so far? I recommend this guest piece posted by Juan Cole. Excerpt:

Both the procedure that produced the constitutional draft that will be voted on this October 15, and its constitutional substance were and are disastrous. As to the procedure, the pathetic rules of the pathetic Transitional Administrative Law [TAL] were violated in a pathetic manner. To start from the beginning, a foreign country, the U.S. has played an unseemly, illegitimate and probably illegal (Hague Convention, 1907) role in the constitution-making process of an occupied country.

Next, the TAL’s rules were repeatedly violated: there was no public or parliamentary discussion of the draft, and it was never voted on. The text was repeatedly changed after the only deadline that was (in my view) legally amended. [Then the three-province veto by a two-thirds majority was reinterpreted as a two-thirds majority of registered voters rather than of actual voters.] Only international pressure finally kept the National Assembly from an absurd misinterpretation of the rule of ratification through a mere law, actually a hidden and therefore illegal constitutional amendment.

No one can know what horrors will result, but Robert Dreyfuss, this morning on Democracy Now!, surmised that after the fissures caused by this US-driven process run their course, ``It's not out of the question that several hundred thousand or a million Iraqis could die over the next two years if this falls into open civil war.''