Step One in a war is demonize the opposition. Well, okay, Step One in a war nowdays is really “get your friends to do the dirty work of bugging the office of the Secretary General of the United Nations and even the office and home of UN chief weapons inspector”. But classically, Step One in a war is demonize the opposition. In Gulf War II, demonizing Saddam is pretty easy to do; what’s hard is to do an Orwell-Ministry-of-Truth rewriting of history to deflect blame from Sadaam’s friends as well.

Often so much time is spent focusing on the evil of the demon that not only is the evil of those around him ignored, but legitimately good results of the demon’s rule as well. In the case of Saddam, that would be his strengthening of the 1959 Iraqi Family Laws. His secular dictatorship was able to overcome widespread, extreme fundamentalist Islamic opposition and give rights to Iraqi women, who for the past half century have been BY FAR the freest women in the Arab world even while living under Saddam’s rule.

American occupiers have supported Iraqi women’s rights by installing a few token women on the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and not much else. (Wanna see something funny / sad / true? That last webpage, in its sixth paragraph, has a link to “the coalition’s new plan for Iraq’s political future”.) With Saddam’s secular Ba’athists prohibited from participation, the IGC is by default heavily Islamic. These religious figures wasted no time in December 2003 proposing IGC Resolution 137 to place Iraq back under Islamic law – and Iraqi women back under denial of the rights to education, employment, freedom of movement and travel, property inheritance and custody of their children, forced early marriage, polygamy, compulsory religious dress, wife beating, execution by stoning as punishment for female adultery and public flogging of women for disobeying religious rules.

Well, the time for debate is over and it’s time to vote – Iraq is scheduled to have a new Constitution TODAY in order to support the U.S. turnover of sovreignty on July 1. Just a few hours ago the vote on Resolution 137 was taken. Its supporters lost with 15 of 25 members voting against the measure – and four to eight (accounts vary) of the losers promptly walked out of the chamber, depriving the Iraqi Constitutional Convention of a quorum to continue. Five of the IGC members were reported not even present at the vote of their country’s interim Constitution (!?!), apparently staying away from the Resolution 137 vote in protest. The remaining IGC members, including the non-Arab Kurds who invented Zoroastrism and thus aren’t really that interested in Islam or Resolution 137, stuck around to argue over creation of a Kurdish Federal Region in northern Iraq. Guess how much harmonious agreement there was on THAT. With tensions rising amid a constitutional crisis, American troop rotations continue to replace 130,000 soldiers with a year of in-country experience with 120,000 fresh troops many of whom were civilians at a desk job only a few weeks ago. Interesting situation: virgin occupation soldiers to enforce martial law at a time of maximum civilian tension during a constitutional crisis. Stay tuned.

Update [2004-3-1 5:1:22 by rickyjames]: The IGC has agreed on an interim Constitution. A final Constitution is to be hammered out after elections sometime in the future after sovreignty turnover.