"a tragic mistake when the U. S. allowed Sharia Law to resume in Iraq and Afghanistan"

Submitted by myth (Germany), Jan 25, 2010 at 12:01

John, this sort of practical approach is not entirely uncommon, to use legal and administrative structure and people that you find in an occupied country. Personally I believe this was utter madness. How can the US military allow for a set of laws they would never accept for themselves, it does not give them much credibility. From a standpoint of common sense you cannot just install a different set of laws that the people have no knowledge of. Who actually reads legal texts? We all know by cultural background what is allowed and what is not.

Maybe one good way to go is Germany after WW2. The western powers of course took out the race legislation but did a poor job prosecuting Nazis, very much different from the soviets in the east. So the Iraq/Afghanistan situation is not entirely new. On the other hand in Germany there were structural changes made to the constitution, democracy, rule of police force and education, broadcasting, no military to begin with and more. This lead to a setup completely different from other western democracy and it incorporated some of the lessons-learned from the rise of the Nazi-regime. As for Iraq, I see Afghanistan as a hopeless case, the job would be to establish a number of instituitions, unknown in the west, to balance the power of sharia legislation on a structural level.

Of course, the military is not exactly the means to achieve this. While some of the great political strategists in the us talk about nation-building I would advocate the building of political parties. I believe there are people in say Iraq that have an interest to go without public sharia law.

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