Carroll Andrew Morse explains Iraq’s real Constitutional Crisis:
The problem is not that Muslim or Arab or Shiite culture is incompatible with a democratic political system. The problem is that the West is about to export yet another defective political construct to Iraq.
The West has been shipping bad political ideas to the Middle East, and to Iraq in particular, for almost a century. In the 1920s, the West sent Iraq the idea that defined borders were enough to establish a nation state, even if the people within had never agreed amongst themselves to get along. A few decades later, the West sent European fascism to Iraq as a brutal but superficially efficient method for dealing with the lack of an Iraqi national identity. Now the West seems poised to send Iraq a third defective political export: its confusion about the nature of constitutionalism, a political export not anywhere as noxious as fascism, but still dangerously flawed.
Originally, constitutions restricted governments. Constitutions laid out procedures that government had to follow when the freedom of the individual was to be limited in the name of the greater good and constitutions checked the power of government by enumerating actions that government could not take. Constitutions did not focus on affirming the existence of rights; individual rights originated from a higher source than government. [...] At the start of the twentieth century, Soviet-style constitutions began to promise all kinds of rights to citizens, without bothering with any mechanism to guarantee or enforce them. Then, after World War II, governments began building de-Nazification protections into rights declarations.
Constitutions went from limiting governments to limiting individuals.