Iraq's constitutional trap

[davidinalameda]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/08/30/EDGR4EE66N1.DTL

IRAQ'S DRAFT constitution has to be disappointing to Americans as well as to numbers of Iraqis who might succeed in voting the document down in an Oct. 15 referendum. At worst, the constitutional mess signals prolongation of the bloody insurgency that prevents the establishment of bearable living conditions in much of Iraq, could lead to civil war and could stall a hoped- for U.S. withdrawal.

Sticking points in the proposed national charter include openings for semi-autonomous regions of Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south, and rebuffs of the Sunni Arab minority that ran the country under ousted dictator Saddam Hussein. The Sunnis want stronger central government and distrust the Shiite clerics whose followers make up a majority of Iraqis.

The draft constitution, though containing guarantees of religious freedom and other individual rights, departs from Western ideas of secular democracy by making Islam the official religion and "a main source of legislation," and giving clergy a role in family matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance. Women under Islamic law would lose rights.