Imposed Constitutions and Established Religion
Noah Feldman Friday, 1 December 2006
The other day I was walking through Greenwich Village, a block from the NYU law school. The usual protesters occupied the corner of West 3rd Street and 6th Avenue, and I did not even break stride to acknowledge the anti-Bush, anti-Iraq posters or the latest headlines in the Socialist Worker. As I passed, though, something unusual happened. An angry voice called out behind me, "Americans shouldn't write the constitution for Iraq!"
My first thought, even before I had registered that I was the subject of a personalized piece of agitprop, was "You're right." Gone are the days when American legal officers could write the constitution of Japan, translate it into Japanese, and extract the acquiescence of such a Japanese government as existed under the auspices of U.S. occupation. Today we are more likely to see documents like Ayatollah Ali Sistani's fatwa of June 26, 2003. That legal opinion declared that the occupying forces of Iraq must not even appoint the participants in a constitutional drafting body. Instead, Sistani ruled participants must be chosen by democratic election and must submit any draft constitution to a popular referendum for ratification.
To read the entire article, please visit this article's page at informaworld, where articles are available for purchase from Routledge, our publishing partner.