Stateless constitution

Patrick Cockburn of The Independent (courtesy of Selves and Others) asks how there can be a constitution without a state in Iraq. The answer is found in Green Zone Myopia.

...Iraq is full of such stories of cruelty and blood. It is not true when George Bush, Tony Blair and Jack Straw say that things are improving. They are getting worse by the day. It was announced yesterday that Iraqis had voted in favour of the new constitution. No doubt this will be lauded in Washington and London as an encouraging glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

But viewed from Baghdad, there is something absurd about the idea that a new constitution - the rules of the game under which the state will be governed - should be taken so seriously abroad when nobody in Iraq obeys the law and in any case there is no state.

Iraq is full of phoney milestones. The US government is congratulating itself this week on training 200,000 army, police and paramilitary forces. But half of the 80,000-strong Iraqi army consists of "ghost" battalions in which commanders pocket the salaries of non-existent troops.

Power is wholly fragmented. Each ministry is the stronghold of one or another party. Every time a new minister takes over, he fires the acolytes of his predecessor and hires his own supporters. Even inside ministries, power is divided again. Within the powerful Interior Ministry, for instance, the director generals of each section act as independent warlords.

Iraqis increasingly see the government as one more bandit gang trying to gouge money out of them. Private kidnap gangs have already forced much of the Iraqi middle class to flee to Jordan, Syria and Egypt. But now there is "official kidnapping", whereby a man is arrested and accused of support for the insurgents. Quite soon it is suggested to him that the only way he can get out of jail is to pay a large sum. One friend sold his house and paid $120,000 to his captors, who promptly arrested his son and demanded the same sum for his release.

The extent of the anarchy may not be evident to American, British and Iraqi officials living in the heavily fortified Green Zone. It is a separate planet. I asked one Iraqi friend who lives there if he thought American officials knew anything of Iraq. He replied derisively: "They don't even dare venture into most of the Green Zone." One Iraqi political leader claims "there are ministers in the government here who have never seen their own ministries because they never leave the zone."