Iraqis Will Manage
By Martin Heilweil
Posted On September 01, 2005

I don't know about Joe Biden's historical knowledge, but most of the rest of us know that the US Constitution was a series of compromises, or deals, which postponed our own civil war from 1789 to 1861, some seventy years, or about the time from Pearl Harbor to now, and yet we have managed as a society, however horrendous those postponed national birth pangs were.

The US version of federalism is constantly under review and renegotiation, no longer by gunfire, and one might even argue that the US central government's supremacy was a coerced artifact of the post-civil-war forced ratification of the civil war amendments, including the now dangerous 14th amendment, as a condition of full restored (sort of) southern statehood. Coerced agreements are considered void, I am saying.

So federalism has had a rocky road here also, but we have managed, and that is what we are asking the Iraqis to do.

As for Iraqi revenue sharing, well we have to look a little deeper into the American record, to one more of the great compromises: Alexander Hamilton decided that for international fiscal credibility, the US's international wartime debts needed to be paid by the federal government, but the money was in Virginia, as the most wealthy province, er, state, surely slave-based money, and so the price of US fiscal restoration from Virginia was a preferential treatment of Virginia, with a southern US capital, in the District of Columbia, a long way from the interim US capitals in Philadelphia, and New York City.

The Iraqi holdouts on secular religious law, sharia, and female subjugation, which is a holdout point that has been buried and lost in the glossolia of why the parties cannot agree, are plausibly bargaining points for more revenue sharing, and so in the end, it all comes down to money, and how reassuring. And federalism, or states rights for female subjugation, is perhaps a further metaphor for our own part-slave origins.

The Islamic factions have been at war since Muhammed died, which is as long as Islam has been at war with Christendom, and so we might give them a few more days to work it out.

By the way, Alexander Hamilton's National Bank was discontinued by the Democrat Andrew Jackson, who also trashed the White house, perhaps an early William Jefferson, while another National Bank was created by a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, former capitalist tool and railroad lawyer, later in politics, later known as the Great Emancipator for finishing the US Revolution.

Joe should go back to cribbing Labor speeches. He is properly joined with Teddy, who cribbed at Harvard. W cribs from our founders, and I like that better.

The author is a writer living in New York City.

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