Constitutionamalism

Dear Leader and his enablers have been busy calling the draft Iraqi Constitution the functional equivalent of the American Constitution of 1787.

I consider that 3/5ths of a bad joke.

Billmon puts it in a lot better detail of just what a joke this is, in, even by his lofty standards, an exceptional post.

But even taking the analogy at face value, the objectives sought by the dominant parties in Iraq are the opposite -- in almost every way -- of those pursued by the majority of the delegates in Philadelphia.

Our framers sought a solution to the seemingly intractable problems of a weak, decentralized confederacy of semi-independent states: precisely the kind of government the ruling coalition of Kurds and Shi'a Islamists now want to create in Iraq, with the apparent blessing of the Cheney administration. What the American founders feared most -- the decomposition of the union into three or four mutually hostile regional confederacies -- is now the official goal of U.S. policy...

...By contrast, the Baghdad experiment (think of Frankenstein and his monster) is about consolidating the gains of the victors from the American invasion and sticking it to the losers. Maybe such a result was inevitable, given Iraq's tortured history and the hovering presence of the global hegemon. But it means that instead of a peace treaty, the resulting document looks more like a declaration of war -- a war which American dollars will have to fund, and American soldiers will have to fight...

...The boys of 2005 (and their American sponsors), on the other hand, are just pygmies pretending to be giants. And the Iraqi people are going to be footing the bill for those pretensions -- in blood -- for a long time to come.

Go read the rest of it.