We the people of Iraq

NO LONGER CONTENT to be mere observers of Iraqi politics -- the idea that Iraqis were determining their own future was always something of a pretense anyway -- U.S. officials changed tack yet again last week. Newly arrived U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and visiting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld emphasized the need for the interim government to produce a constitution by an Aug. 15 deadline.

The reasoning is clear: The sooner there’s a constitution -- and a referendum on it, as well as new legislative elections -- the sooner the political process needed to defeat the insurgency can find traction. That’s a precondition for the possible withdrawal of large numbers of the 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

U.S. constitutional experts helped to draft the Iraqi constitution, but of course it will be up to Iraqis to make the final decision and, most important, to live up to the document’s ideals. Three issues are contentious: How much autonomy will the Kurds and Shiites have? Both want as much as possible, but the minority Sunnis want a stronger central government. Then there’s the role of Islam: the source of all law or merely a foundation for the laws?

Finally, what will the basic document intended to shape a nation’s destiny say about women? Under Saddam Hussein, women had much the same rights (and anxieties) as men: They were not forced to cover themselves Saudi-style, but they were compelled like their husbands and sons to worry about knocks on the door and summary executions.

Those fears, at least, are gone. But the framers of Iraq’s new constitution appear to have forgotten, if they ever read it, the first Arab Human Development Report, published in 2002. The report criticized the poor treatment of women in the Arab world and said its failure to educate women “deprived it of the creativity and productivity of half its citizens.”

A draft of the new constitution makes it likely women will have fewer seats in future legislatures than the current guaranteed minimum of 25%; it also would also shift disputes over matters such as divorce and inheritance from civil courts to religious courts, where women are greatly disadvantaged. Just last year, a leading cleric’s proposal to reinstate the use of religious courts for domestic matters was rejected by the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, who maintained a high profile.

His successor, and the first U.S. ambassador to the new Iraq, John D. Negroponte, was less visible -- in keeping with Washington’s insistence, especially after elections in January, that Iraqis were running the show. Khalilzad, the former ambassador to Afghanistan, has been much more prominent, as he was while that nation formed a new government and a new constitution.

Last week, Khalilzad said he planned to bring various groups together to forge a compromise on the constitution. Drafting the document has been a difficult process from the start. Sunnis boycotted the January elections, so they were mostly unrepresented among the legislators on the drafting committee. Eventually, they were given seats at the table, but when a drafter and an aide were murdered this month, Sunnis again shunned the negotiations, returning only after being given greater security.

Rumsfeld also used his unexpected visit to Iraq last week to urge the Iraqis to draft a constitution by the Aug. 15 deadline. The top U.S. military commander in the country, Army Gen. George W. Casey, predicted “substantial reductions” in the number of U.S. troops in the country next spring and summer if the political process moved forward and more Iraqi security forces were trained.

That must be the goal. Iraq needs U.S. troops now, but their presence motivates insurgents at the same time it protects Iraqis. Nearly 1,800 Americans have been killed in Iraq, and the plague of suicide bombings goes on. In such an atmosphere, the newly assertive stances of Khalilzad and Rumsfeld make sense, even if they do represent yet another shift in U.S. policy. Getting basic laws that respect the rights of all Iraqis -- regardless of gender, ethnicity or religion -- would be an important development in creating a nation that no longer murders its citizens or invades its neighbors.