IRAQ AND DEMOCRACY?

Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com does it again! His column today shows, with extensive quotes from the Iraqi constitution that is being drawn up, that even the feeble Bushian excuse that we're in Iraq to bring democracy to that country is just as false as the claim that Iraq had WMD prior to our invasion.

Here is a particularly galling sample:

A pretty cushy deal, eh? Oh, but it gets better in Article 7:

"Iraqi citizens have the right to enjoy security and free health care. The Iraqi federal government and regional governments must provide it and expand the fields of prevention, treatment, and medication by the construction of various hospitals and health institutions".

I guess the Iraqi Founders can afford to be generous. After all, you're paying for it – yeah, that's right, you, the American taxpayer. You may be unemployed, widowed, orphaned, and eventually driven into homelessness by confiscatory taxation or just the sheer cruelty of having to keep pace with the rat race, but please rest assured that none of these terrible fates will be suffered by the Iraqis. You may be without healthcare, but no Iraqi will go without. That's what it means to be "liberated," these days – if you don't wind up as "collateral damage," you get to spend other people's money, and the sky's the limit.

That's what we're fighting for, good people--free health care for Iraqis while Bush and his HMO/Big Pharma buddies try to make it as expensive as possible to get health care for ourselves.

Raimondo goes on to point out how each grant of liberty in the Iraqi constitution is followed by a caveat that allows for it to be easily negated, as he explains here:

The apotheosis of this Islamofascist legal-political doctrine has got to be Article 13, my own personal favorite, which solemnly states:

"1. Public and private freedoms are protected provided they do not conflict with moral values and public decency."

In Basra, in the south of Iraq, the religious police are already patrolling the streets, brutally repressing all signs of un-Islamic behavior: alcohol, bright clothing, modern haircuts, men who shave their faces, unveiled women, and other such abominations. This provision legalizes these fanatic vigilante gangs and paves the way for their institutionalization as legal arms of the "Islamic Republic of Iraq."

And this brings up an interesting question--is this the first you've heard of this? Because it's the first I've heard of it. Why is MSNBC, for example, running movie preview/celebrity puff shows on the weekends instead of say, putting together a program or programs about...oh, I don't know, the contents of the Iraqi constitution?