Spc. Carrie L.French, 19

That’s right 43 lost their lives for rule by the clerics. We will install “Iranian style Democracy”.  Islam will now be the primary source of law in the Constitution as oppose to a source. The clerics will dominate family law, divorce, inheritance and child custody.  Women won’t have a secular alternative.  All laws in Iraq can be nullified by the Clerics under the Constitution. The administration is twisting arms for this atrocity.

Crossposted fromDameocrat Blog

According to the Guardian

There are currently 138,000 US troops in Iraq, including 25,000 marines. President Bush has repeatedly denied that the US intends to “cut and run”, leaving Iraq to the insurgents. “Our troops know that they’re fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to protect their fellow Americans from a savage enemy,” the president said yesterday in his weekly radio address.

Conservative Shias, dominant in the Iraqi government, had clashed with Kurds and other minorities who wanted Islam to be “a” rather than “the” main source of law.

According to Kurdish and Sunni negotiators, the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, proposed that Islam be named “a primary source” and supported a wording which would give clerics authority in civil matters such as divorce, marriage and inheritance.

If approved, critics say that the proposals would erode women’s rights and other freedoms enshrined under existing laws. “We understand the Americans have sided with the Shias. It’s shocking. It doesn’t fit with American values,” an unnamed Kurdish negotiator told Reuters. “They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state.”

Dozens of women gathered in central Baghdad yesterday to protest against what the organiser, Yanar Mohammad, feared would be a “fascist, nationalist and Islamist” constitution. “We are fighting to avoid becoming second class citizens,” she said.

A Bush supporter had this to say on MTP.

GERECHT: I think it’s important to remember that in the year 1900, for example, in the United States … women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we’d all be thrilled. I mean, women’s social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy. We hope they’re there. I think they will be there. But I think we need to put this into perspective.

Excuse me, but the American constitution was changable because it was not beholden to religious law. Iraqi women will have to arm themselves and overthrow the government to get change.