House editorial

Iraq’s new democracy not something to be rushed

Over the weekend, the nation of Iraq voted on its charter constitution. After nearly two decades under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, Iraq is taking a crucial step towards establishing a democracy. But it is unfortunately just a step — and looking at American history, a small step.

Technically, George Washington is not the first president of the United States — yes, he is the first president under the Constitution, but if we look back, we see that our founding fathers first tried out the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles, there were actually 10 presidents and the president served as the presiding officer of Congress, not as chief executive as he does now. However, this friendly league of states was tested and very quickly proved to be unusable. Our founding fathers then moved to the Constitution. But after being ratified 18 times to add 17 amendments, it was obviously far from perfect when it was created.

So what does this say about Iraq? While they are at the beginning stages of establishing a democracy, they have a while to go, especially in such a volatile country. The Sunni Arabs, who account for one-fifth of Iraq’s population, showed up in masses to protest the charter constitution. Their protests were based around their fears that the constitution will lead to a break-up of the nation and unfair oil distribution. Their fears and doubts may be completely justified and a large enough issue that it may cause the future government to make changes to the constitution.

But for now, the protesting was not successful enough to stop the ratification of the charter constitution because, as of Sunday afternoon, our government stated that it was highly likely that the constitution would pass.

Bush would like to leave our military in Iraq until a government is firmly established. But how can we say when that will be? And is it reasonable for Bush to offer something like that?

If George Washington were around, he would probably say no. And our country even wanted a democracy, while not all of Iraq does.

We can only hope history won’t repeat itself and that this step Iraq is taking won’t need 10 more steps to fix it.