Break out the burqas

Billmon looks at the the Reuters report and has a really informative post on the latest developments in the Iraqi constitution. Read it all and you'll learn some stuff you probably didn't know about Islam, women's rights and the Afghani constitution, but here's the money grafs.

Whether the New Iraq is more or less likely over time to accept the values of Western individualism (including feminism) than the old Iraq would have been if Saddam's regime had been left to decompose and collapse at it's own rate, is a question that can't be answered. It's not even clear the Cheney administration ever had any serious intention of promoting those values except as a smokescreen for the exercise of American power. When the historians finally write their histories, democracy in Iraq may end up as just another item on the list of bullshit bureaucratic excuses for this war -- behind weapons of mass destruction, but ahead of creating a "flytrap" for terrorists.

It is increasingly clear, though, that whatever the original face value of Bush's promises of liberation, the American public is no longer willing to pay the price to redeem them. The enterprise is busted -- as broke as Arbusto Energy and Spectrum 7 ever were. All that's left in the corporate till now are the lies that will now be used to obscure the birth (in all but name) of the Islamic Republic of Iraq.

Actually I read somewhere recently that they want to call it the New Islamic Republic of Iraq. I hear the White House wasn't that keen on the idea.