"from a racist partisan background, not from a national one"

"Talabani has dealt with the elections law from a racist partisan background, not from a national one. Accordingly, he's not qualified to lead Iraq and we demand the parliament to immediately sack him," MP Khalaf al-Alyan, the leader of the National Dialogue Council (NDC), told VOI.

Racist? Tusk, tusk! Can one not be a narrow, self-servicing chauvinist and tactful at the same time? Well, possibly one cannot, but M. al-‘Alyán ain’t even trying.

However, it is that "accordingly" that brings him within reach of Pol. Sci. M. al-‘Alyán obviously agrees with His Excellency, M. le Président de Tálebání, that whatever is hostile to NatRec (al-tawáfuq al-wataní, "national reconciliation") is automatically contrary to ... lemme see ... contrary to "the constitution's soul and essence, represented by the consensus principle to solve all problems, disputes, and differences among blocs and major components."

Part of the jolliness of the litigation is that Khalílzád Pasha’s Kiddie Konstitution never expressly says that NatRec wins all ties. It does not, for that matter, even announce unambiguously that its own Soul and Essence take precedence over anything merely set out in prose. Easterners being ever so much more geistlich than thee and me and James Madison, Mr. Bones, such a declaration may have been thought superfluous. On the other hand, I fear the Supremacy of Spirit may never have been thought of at all by such Venerable Neo-Framers as N. Feldman of Harvard and Z. Khalílzád himself (of AEI and GOP). Compared with what the Gang of Eighty-Seven came up with, the KPKK is a sad botch. Undoubtedly the perpetrators would have been well advised to make perfectly clear that their Kiddie Konstitution is not an attempt at bein’ Madisonian at all, but something radically different. (A wild stab at the provision of Crawfordite "trainin’ wheels" for the backward and benighted indigenes of Mesopotamia, perhaps?)

However that may be, the Venerable Neo-Framers did nothing of the sort, which leaves the beneficiaries of their gracious invasion-based wisdom with a foundational document that superficially looks like bad Madison, a grossly inferior performance in a well established genre. (I have toyed with the notion that the damn thing is a deliberate spoof, but that is highly unlikely.) There is nothing in it that warns the unwary not to try to use the Kiddie Konstitution as they would use the U. S. Federal Constitution of 1787. Nobody who sets out to construe the KPKK on that basis is ever going to get very far, but nobody is prevented from taking a whack at it.

M. de Tálebání and M. al-‘Alyán have perhaps never heard of that kind of a whack. If they were asked to explain what use constitutions are in civilised countries, I shudder to think of what they might say. It is not their fault that they are clueless -- how should they learn about things like that when they were subjects of the former Iraq? Turks after 1908 and Brits and Mecca Monarchs and patriot officers after 1958 and ‘Aflaqí Ba‘thís all came equipped with documents purporting to be constitutions. No self-respecting neorégime would be caught dead without one. But Mr. Madison is scarcely on speaking terms with the ringmasters of that sort of circus. Nobody in the Greater Levant has any reverence for circus constitutions. It is difficult to imagine any sane human anywhere being capable of revering them.

Under the circumstances it is natural enough that M. de Tálebání and M. al-‘Alyán prefer to pick up the Feldman-Khalílzád contraption by its "spirit and essence" end and say as little as possible about the crude and vulgar and Madisonian aspects. Geist und Wesen may be alarmingly hazy at times, but they are nonetheless reverable entities. The constitution-as-blueprint cannot be revered by anybody whose experience is only of Greater Levantine examples, bastard documents imported from afar that were merely decorative or, worse than decorative, were used as camouflage by and for those who rule strictly by force and fraud. Neocomrade Professor B. Lewis explains the general paradigm involved in a polemic called What Went Wrong? Few imported things have gone wrong worse in the Greater Levant that civilised constitutionalism. Other things have done more harm, since ‘Constitutions’ and Konstitutions do tend to become mostly mere decoration, but in terms of the distance between the original and the perversion of it, I am not sure any other Greater European product that Levantines and Semites borrowed and then wrecked can match the constitution-as-blueprint. But God knows best.

Still languishing under the yoke of AEI and GOP and DOD, M. de Tálebání and M. al-‘Alyán are in no position to simply reject Khalílzád Pasha’s Kiddie Konstitution. They do not know how to use it sensibly, but they understand well enough that they must praise the KPKK to the skies, and that it would never do them any harm to pretend to be constitutionalists, whatever strange breed of political animal that may be. And if thee and I had no more idea than they have, Mr. Bones, perhaps we would find ""the constitution's soul and essence, represented by the consensus principle to solve all problems, disputes, and differences among blocs and major components" more edifying than laughable. At a very deep level of Pol. Sci., their common absurdity could be defended: something like a "consensus principle" perhaps does have to exist first, if a constitution-as-blueprint is ever to be erected above it and made to work properly.

At the level they are actually on, however, M. de Tálebání and M. al-‘Alyán have about as much dignity as a frathouse food fight. These stout champions of Soul and Essence and Tawáfuq Wataní are simply trying to use the Feldman-Khalílzád contraption to clobber one another over the head with. The quasipresident thinks it his kiddie-konstitutional duty to veto anything contrary to his notion of NatRec, and the quasideputy thinks the quasipresident ought to be dismissed for not assenting to his notion of NatRec. Meanwhile, it is only too obvious what substantive rattle Tweedledumb and Tweedledee are really contending over. The decent political grown-up is likely to sympathize with the Monstrous Crow

more than with anybody else

in sight, I fear.