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Lowered Expectations

Jill

President Bush needs to raise the bar.

The president’s recent schedule of nonstop disaster-scene photo-ops is reminiscent of the principal of a failing school who believes he’s doing a great job because he makes it a point to drop in on every class play and teacher retirement party. And if there ever was an exhibit of the misguided conviction that for some people very little is good enough, it’s the current administration spin that the proposed Iraqi constitution is fine because the founding fathers didn’t give women equal rights either.

(emphasis mine).

Only a president with no expectation that the federal government should step up after a crisis could have stripped the Federal Emergency Management Agency bare, appointed as its director a political crony who could not even adequately represent the breeders of Arabian horses, and announced that the director was doing a splendid job while bodies floated in the floodwaters.

Ouch.

In Iraq, the elimination of expectations is on display in the disastrous political process. Among other things, the constitution drafted under American supervision does not provide for the rights of women and minorities and enshrines one religion as the fundamental source of law. Administration officials excuse this poor excuse for a constitution by saying it also refers to democratic values. But it makes them secondary to Islamic law and never actually defines them. Our founding fathers had higher expectations: they made the split of church and state fundamental, and spelled out what they meant by democracy and the rule of law.

It’s true that the United States Constitution once allowed slavery, denied women the right to vote and granted property rights only to white men. But it’s offensive for the administration to use that as an excuse for the failings of the Iraqi constitution. The bar on democracy has been raised since 1787. We don’t agree that the 218-year-old standard is good enough for Iraq.

I have nothing else to add; this is spot-on. And yet another reason why I love the New York Times editorial pages.

7 thoughts on Lowered Expectations

  1. Interestingly enough, when a very similar constitution was enacted in Afghanistan, the NY Times and other liberal media outlets praised it as a solid advance, an excellent step forward, an imperfect but real achievement.

    But of course, the Times wasn’t opposed to the war in Afghanistan. And any outcome of the war in Iraq – such as a reasonably democratic constitution that paves the way for organic improvements over time as the Iraqis themselves demand and implement them – must be negative, for the Times’ relentless opposition to the war to be validated. No success can be permitted; no outcome can be praised for its merits. Everything has to be shit.

  2. That’s fucking ridiculous.

    The Times – via Judith Miller – was one of the chief watercarriers for the Bush administration during the runup to Iraq.

    And the Iraq Constitution will destroy the professional and personal lives of countless women. Is that a success?

    Oh, wait. For the Christian right, maybe it is.

  3. The Times did indeed support the runup to the war. And they have subsequently turned against it. That previous support does not change the point of my comment: a constitution that was a wonderful outcome for a war they supported, is a terrible outcome in a war they oppose. This tells us very little about the constitution, and quite a bit about the Times.

    Women’s rights activists are upset by the fact that the Iraqi constitution gives a voice to people who are opposed to women’s liberation. That is an understandable position. However, political voices cannot be silenced indefinitely; they have to be dealt with. If Iraqi society has become so anti-woman that a significant majority of the electorate wants to “destroy the lives of women” then that is a terrible thing; however, I don’t believe that to be the case. Even if it is the case, you cannot permanently impose goodness on people by force; at some point, they have to make independent moral choices.

    There are complex social and political questions in Iraq, questions that the people themselves will have to deal with over time. A dictator was able to squash those questions, and impose answers – some of which answers were more or less palatable to those of us outside the country. But the fact remains that they were imposed answers, rather than answers reached by a sometimes-painful political process.

    To use an alphabetical analogy, the Iraqis were as far as “M” by dictator’s fiat, and now they’re back to “A” – but they are now free to move all the way to “Z”, if that’s what they want to do. It would probably be most productive for us in the west to encourage them to start moving forward in the alphabet.

  4. I think Auguste is having trouble distinguishing between one reporter’s work and the overall editorial decisions of the Times, more specifically the editorial page.

    And overall, despite Miller’s inaccurate reporting that buttressed certain Amin war rationale, the editorial decisions of the Times were not the efforts of “chief watercarriers for the Bush administration during the runup to Iraq.”

    I mean, except maybe on “Planet Kos, a parallel universe somewhat like our own but with more screaming,” that is.

  5. I wish I could share Robert’s optimism about Iraq’s future. I sincerely hope that democracy takes hold and flourishes the way he seems to think it will. I have my doubts, but then since I opposed the war, I guess that isn’t surprising. And of course, opposing the war and doubting that everything will work out wonderfully in Iraq must make me a Saddam-loving, terrorist-supporting, America-hater, at least in the eyes of the Administration and many of its most vocal supporters…remember, dissent is treason!

  6. Iraq has more obstacles to basic rights than their laws & constitution.

    Some conservative said a few weeks ago that Iraq’s new democracy was comparable to the United States’ in the early 1900’s, and that that was laudable enough that the lack of women’s rights was not that important in light of such an achievement. I think a better analogy would be to say that Iraqi society (not government-on-paper, but *life*) is comparable to the racial atmosphere in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s: American blacks had few rights, and exercising them put them in danger from the Ku Klux Klan, which was ignored, if not aided, by the local governments. Iraqi women have few rights, and face attacks from religious extremists if they deviate from those clerics’ ideas of proper dress and behavior. Sometimes these attacks leave permanant injury (acid thrown at uncovered faces, for example) and some women have been murdered. At least Saddam kept these sorts of atrocities under control, which is more than the US seems to give a damn about.

    Iraq’s constitution needs a religious freedom amendment, one that affirms each person’s right to interpret religious law for him/herself and to act on that interpretation, free from coersion or punishment from people who disagree. It needs it. Which means, of course, that it isn’t gonna get it.

    Fucking government. Too talented at doing what it isn’t supposed to do, too inept at everything else.

  7. Kyra, your analogy is probably sound, if exaggerated; I doubt many Iraqi women would trade places with an American black circa 1900.

    Your final sentence is the most succinct expression of the empirical case for libertarianism I’ve yet read. Powers not possessed are powers that cannot be abused.

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