WHAT A DIFFERENCE A 'CONSTITUTION' MAKES?

Col. Writ. 10/19/05] Copyright 2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal

With the proposed constitutional voting out of the way, the nation's president and the press are calling for celebrations, suggesting that Iraq, battered, beaten, all but broken Iraq, is on the yellow brick road to 'democracy.'
Forget, for a second, the nonsense about 'democracy', as if it is a lily that can be planted in desert soil, but the legalistic, word-infested, daze with which Americans treat the subject of 'constitutions', leads many folks to think that once words are written on paper, the deed is almost done.
That is the thinking of many in this business-oriented contract culture: paper equates to power, and what is written becomes real.
But Iraq threatens to prove that paper is, after all, just paper.
And some observers are seeing, not 'democracy' on the horizon, but the harrowing spectre of civil war.