I am writing the day before the “deadline” for the announcement of the new Iraqi constitution. How does a world citizen interpret this event? First, the writing of a national constitution in a century of instantaneous world communication plus the possibility of nuclear destruction of humanity seems an exercise in futility.
The obvious question supposes: Is a national constitution given the absence of a world constitution endorsed by the sovereign people of the world for peace IN THE WORLD COMMUNITY relevant at all? Put another way, is a national constitution spelling out the modes of order for a particular people relevant to that people’s biological and conceptual unity with humanity without at the same time acknowledging that overarching unity?
I have not seen the Preamble to the proposed Iraqi constitution. Does it mention the sovereignty of the people of Iraq itself as the sanction for such an enterprise? Does it recognize the need for and reality of de facto world law as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? (Ref. Article 21[3]: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.” And Article 28: “Everyone is entitled to a social and internationa order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declarartion can be fully realized”).
The news today in the New York Times is principally on the US troops fighting an “insurgency” in Iraq, whether there should be a “timeline” for withdrawal or as a top general, Peter Shoomaker claims in the same story, that the army is prepared for the “worst case” scenario, that the “required level of (US) troops in Iraq would last until 2009.”
No commentary on this subject has put the Iraqi war in the context of a global community in which humanity is a viable and dynamic species poised on the brink of a nuclear holocaust amidst other environmental problems led by global warming and radio-active pollution due to nuclear waste.
The myopic view expressed by opponents of a “deadline” for a pullout or an extended occupation of Iraq by US troops is exposed by the argument that a “vacuum” would be generated by a pullout leading to a civil war among the various contending religious and political forces inside Iraq.
Let us suppose, however, that a new force representing world law would replace the military troops. Such a force has already been created. It is called the Sovereign Order of World Guards. Its recruitment began in 1956. But its history is ancient beginning ages ago with the women of Greece and told by the story of Lysistrata. Peace “armies” of concerned individuals abound throughout history. Today, in Sri Lanka a “peace army,” under extremely limiting conditions, has been instrumental in maintaining a quasi-peace between the Tamils of the North and the rest of that country. Civilian peace groups even gathered in Iraq prior to the US invasion in 2001.
The SOWG, unarmed and willing as are the US troops as well as the suicide bombers to consider themselves dispensable in the name, not of a nation-state or a religious fanaticism, but of sovereign humanity itself, would constitute a moral and rational counterbalance to the now-opposing local forces. Representing the wellbeing of all the Iraqi people dynamically allied with their brothers and sister humans throughout the world would instantly change the character of the internal struggle for superiority. Killing an unarmed Sovereign World Guard would constitute not only an act of moral deprecation but be useless in terms of advancing a relative politics on the ground, as it were.
As for instituting “democracy” IN Iraq, minus a recognition of the essential oneness of the human family NOW, that goal is utopic and irrational.
The “cradle of civilization” which identifies the land between the Euphraties and Tigres rivers from which historically present-day humanity derives, must claim its age-old heritage by recognizing and enshrining in the forthcoming constitution its partnership with the world as such. Otherwise, it cannot but be relegated to that dustbin of history.