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New Iraq well on way to becoming Islamic state By David Rennie in Washington 29 October 2003: The Daily Telegraph THE United States is failing in its mission to create a secular, overtly pro-Western Iraq, a leading adviser to the American administrator Paul Bremer said yesterday. Instead, the new, democratic Iraq appears bound to be an Islamic state - with an official role for Islam, and Islamic law enshrined in its constitution. That prospect is triggering alarm and opposition from the White House and the Pentagon, Noah Feldman, a leading American expert in Islamic law, told The Daily Telegraph. Dr Feldman served as senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, working closely with Mr Bremer. Returning from Baghdad this summer, the New York University law professor now works as an unpaid adviser to the CPA, to the White House, and to different factions in the Iraqi Governing Council. The end constitutional product is very likely to make many people in the US government unhappy. Its not going to look the way people imagined it looking, said Dr Feldman. Any democratically elected Iraqi government is unlikely to be secular, and unlikely to be pro-Israel. While these predictions are spreading alarm inside the administration, Dr Feldman advocates dealing with Islamic democrats. He argues that Islamic parties will rise anyway, and are most dangerous when forced underground by secular autocrats. Such views led Pentagon officials to accuse Dr Feldman of being soft on Islam. When I tell them these things Islam and Islamic law are going to be in the constitution, people are very concerned about it. Theres still a hope that the country will be as secular as possible. But frankly nothing in Iraq is going to look the way people imagined. Maybe if people had taken that on board, they might have felt differently about the plan for an invasion. The hawkish idealists who pushed hardest for regime change in Iraq saw the fall of Baghdad as the first step towards remaking the Middle East. In their vision, Iraq would rise up as a democratic, secular, free market capitalist beacon to its neighbours - guided, at least initially, by such exiled leaders as Ahmad Chalabi, a secularist and Pentagon favourite. In their plan, the country was to be turned into a federation of 18 or so provinces, preventing such powerful ethnic factions as the Kurds from setting up autonomous fiefdoms that might split the country apart and threaten the stability of an already volatile neighbourhood. Yet the Kurds have made it plain that they expect to emerge with an autonomous Kurdish region, and will not support any constitution that would split their territory into mini-provinces, Dr Feldman reported. Though US allies, the Kurds retain 40,000 men under arms, and have declined US invitations to disband such militias. Pentagon officials sent Dr Feldman to Baghdad for his knowledge of Islamic law. In many ways he was an unlikely candidate: he is a Democrat, Jewish and still only 32. One senior administration official declared before the war that the first foreign policy of a democratic Iraq would be to recognise Israel. I dont know what he was smoking when he said that, said Dr Feldman. He argued that Iraqi-Israeli relations were off the radar, as Washington struggled simply to keep Iraq from slipping into disaster.
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