Demagogue

Maybe not to my embryonic fellow Demagogues, but to those of us of a certain age, this picture brings back some powerful memories.



Not being in the U.S., I have to depend on others to tell me: how prominently have U.S. media reported that one of the main parties in the likely ruling coalition is called the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq?

Oh, and speaking of memories, does anyone remember how our invasion of Afghanistan was really cool because it was going to liberate Afghan women from the oppression of fundamentalist Islam?

Consider the plans of the probable big winner on Sunday, the Shiite coalition unofficially endorsed by the chap in the big poster, Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

[The Shiite coalition] will seek to implement religious law in the place of civil law for matters of personal status, and possibly in other realms, such as commerce. Islamic law has provisions for matters such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony and so forth. Muslim fundamentalists throughout the world have adopted as one of their main political goals the repeal of civil laws that were most often adopted during or just after the age of European colonialism (roughly from the mid-1700s until the 1960s), and to replace them with a rigid and often medieval interpretation of Islamic law.

This form of Islamic law (which in other hands can be dynamic and innovative) would typically deny divorced women any inheritance, give girls half the inheritance received by their brothers, restrict women's right to initiate divorce, restrict women's appearance in public, and make the testimony of women in court worth half that of a man. Middle-class Sunni Arabs and educated women, along with most Kurds, would likely strongly resist this initiative. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, among the main Shiite parties, and Grand Ayatollah Sistani have already telegraphed their desire for this change.

At least this move might create a rare opportunity for Arab Muslims and Israeli Jews to make common cause; matters of personal status are governed in Israel by religious law, which has left a number of Jewish wives in dire straits when their husbands wouldn't allow them a divorce, so their Iraqi sisters will have someone to turn to when the same thing happens to them.

This democracy stuff is a bit more complicated than "Yippee! They held an election!" No one knows for sure what's going to happen next in Iraq. My pessimism isn't certitude; I just think the odds favor a pretty dismal future.