What We're Fighting For In Iraq

Drafts of the new Iraqi constitution are being shopped around for review. It won't be surprising if many of the concepts that Americans included in Iraq's interim constitution are missing from the version that emerges in September.

For example, the quaint US idea of setting aside a predetermined percentage of parliament seats for women. That's not going to be in the new constitution.

Or how about women's rights which were guaranteed in the interim constitution? Not so much in the new Iraqi version. Yes, women's rights are protected, unless they conflict with Islamic law. If that happens, then Koranic law takes precedence.

...the shift away from the more secular and equitable language of the interim constitution would represent a victory for Shiite clerics and religious politicians, who now wield enormous power and had chafed at the influence exercised by the Americans over that earlier document.

If Iraq's constitution writers have any problems squaring religious law with secular, they can always ask for advice from their new best friends in Iran.

... is it surprising to find the Iraqi government looking for help from powerful Iran? No, but it certainly poses a problem for the White House, which now finds itself putting American soldiers' lives on the line every day to prop up an active ally of the country that we claim, with some plausibility, funds anti-Israeli and other terror groups and is bent on making its own nuclear bomb.

So....we started a war that will result in the subjugation of Iraq women and the alliance of Iraq and Iran. Did I miss the memo that mentioned those goals?