A Tale of Two Constitutional Conventions: Iraq's and Ours

Next week I will begin teaching a college seminar entitled, “The Early American Republic,” and the first subject we will tackle over the month of September is the framing of the constitution of the United States and the struggle for ratification. By October we will study the challenges to the power of the newly created nation by a political opposition party and by the people themselves. At about the same time, Iraqi citizens will be going to the polls to vote on a proposed federal constitution for their nation. We will be studying that constitutional movement as well for a couple of reasons.

First, many supporters of the president’s war in Iraq have been defending the constitutional process there, despite its setbacks, by comparing Iraq’s difficulties to those faced by the nascent United States. And indeed, they are correct that some similarities exist. Like the U.S. constitutional convention, the Iraqis have been plagued by sectional divisions, economic animosity, and self-interested politicians who are ready to sacrifice justice for political expediency. But that is where the similarities end.

The second, and more important reason for comparison is that of difference. The American states were divided into three interest groups: the plantation agriculture South, the “carrying” East (known to us as “the North”), and the hardscrabble, squatting West. Iraq is divided between the oil-rich Kurdish North, the oil-rich Shiite South, and the oil-poor Sunni-Shiite Middle. In the U.S., the wealthier South and East excluded the impoverished West from the convention, whereas in Iraq, the U.S. has framed the process to include the impoverished Middle.

The difference? In the U.S., the creation of national government was never in question within the Pennsylvania State House (now called Independence Hall). The new government would tackle the problem of Revolutionary War debts owed by Southern and Eastern states. The questions revolved primarily over the shape of the government, principally the amount of control over the economy that states would retain, and the method of representation in the new national government that would provide states the ability to influence national policy. In Iraq, the impoverished Middle, where the insurgency primarily resides, is intimately involved in the drafting process. And there, the Middle is producing a muddle.

In Philadelphia, the majority of delegates supported a national government that reigned supreme over state governments. Indeed, James Madison, the author of the “Virginia Plan” which became the working-document of the debates, called for the national government to hold a veto over states’ laws! (That provision obviously didn’t make it.) It was the opposition from smaller Eastern states that called for a confederation where state sovereignty ruled supreme: the “New Jersey Plan.” In Baghdad, conversely, the majority support a plan called “federalism” which is not very federal at all. In this plan, Iraq would be divided into three states, each with its own laws protected from the national government, its own control of resident resources, and only loosely bound together as Iraq while retaining the right to leave the union. The opposition from the Middle is calling for a strong national government, shared control and benefit from national resources, and assurances that the union will persist. In Philadelphia, where the men assembled all represented economic interests, the impetus to compromise was great, and the “Connecticut Compromise” retained national sovereignty while assuring smaller states equal influence over national policy with the creation of a bi-cameral assembly where the equally apportioned and appointed Senate sits above the popularly apportioned and elected House of Representatives. In Baghdad, no such impetus to compromise exists, and the historical question is: “Why?” This is where differences are important, and where history teaches us if we choose to learn.

The difference is choice. The men who met in Philadelphia had chosen, on their own, to break from the British Empire when it restricted their access to speculate in western lands (inhabited by original peoples) after the French and Indian War, and then levied taxes to raise revenue to pay for the costs of that war and the army of 10,000 troops it left in the colonies to police the colonists and prevent them from moving onto Indian land. They chose to declare their independence even though a majority of Americans were either opposed or indifferent to the proposition in 1776. They chose to arm bands of militia in their colonies turned states to take over local government, to fine and imprison Loyalists, and to coerce neutrals into supporting their war. They chose to invite and accept assistance from France, a first-rate empire, in their anti-imperial crusade. After the battle of Yorktown, they chose to ask the French to remove their navy and their marines from the country, and the French, still fighting Britain for the main prize, the Caribbean, chose to leave. For four years, they chose to live under state laws within the loose union provided by the nation’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, until the problems of international and domestic debt rising from the war pushed them to choose “to amend” the Articles at Philadelphia. Once in the City of Brotherly Love, they chose a course of action as bold and revolutionary as the events of 1776. They chose to defy the law of the Articles and to defy the wishes of the state governments that sent them to Philadelphia by proposing a wholly new constitution. Not surprisingly, they chose to hold their convention in complete secrecy.

The men (and a few women) who are meeting in Baghdad have made none of these choices. They did not choose to overthrow an offensive imperial power. Instead, a quasi-imperial power invaded their country, killed thousands of their soldiers and civilians, toppled their government, turned over the reconstruction and economic development of their country to its own private contractors, and then informed them that it was their duty to create a free and democratic form of government. So, at their convention, they are now exercising their choice, and that choice seems to be the opposite of what the invader intended. They are choosing not to compromise. In the U.S., eight years of fighting the British created a Revolutionary majority. Though by no means a consensus in 1783, the rebels had forged a common cause in spite of sectional, economic, religious, and ethnic differences. And in victory, they believed that they had created something worth saving. They had created a nation, and, in so doing, a national debt. To save one from the other, the Revolutionaries believed that they still had something to fight for in 1787. Not so in Iraq. There is little nationalistic feeling in Iraq. The Shiite South did not reach out to the Kurdish North to battle Saddam’s Sunnis oppressing the Shiites in the Middle. They have no victory. They have no nation. They do have debts, as well as assets, but they lack a self-created nationalism needed to convince the North and the South to share both.

The differences between Iraq’s and the U.S. constitutional processes (and many, many more exist) far outweigh the similarities, and it is the differences gleaned from history that provide us a glimpse into Iraq’s future. Neo-conservative pundits, like David Brooks from the New York Times, who like to excuse Iraq’s constitutional troubles by citing similarities to the U.S. experience, state that constitution making is hard, and that even the U.S. descended into Civil war over the principal issue of states’ rights versus federal power, and besides, that was four score and seven years later. This should not comfort us. In the U.S., there were local movements (and one war in Massachusetts) against state governments in the year before the Philadelphia Convention. But in Iraq, civil war is not decades in the future. It is an insurgency that is spiraling into civil war right this instant, as seen by the fighting between rival Shiite factions in recent days. And in the U.S., the framers created a national government with supreme power, allowing it to put down threats to the union like the misnamed “Whiskey Rebellion” in 1794 (really a rebellion against federal taxing, trading, and land policies), Fries’s Rebellion against the federal government’s Sedition Act and Direct Tax in 1798, and the Confederate insurrection in 1861. Iraq’s central government will lack that authority.

From this historian’s perspective, what we are witnessing in Iraq is not the birth of a nation, but rather, the stillbirth of a failed nation. What a great teaching moment for my college students. What a tragedy for the Iraqi people.