60 Pieces

This is out of temporal reality. Deal with it.

So according to this BBC story:

"[George Bush believes] that the fact that Iraqi legislature passed 60 pieces of legislation 'was illustrative of a government that's beginning to work.'.

This is not intended to be unadulterated Bush-bashing. But I have two problems with this statement, enumerated below..

One: if the Iraqi government have only passed 60 pieces of legislation since they started, they've been a model of small government. A new country in a state like Iraq should have hundreds of laws passed all the time, and amendments to laws already passed as those laws turn out not to work in the real world. The US, for example, does not exist solely by virtue of the Constitution; the Constitution simply spells out how the government is supposed to work, not what things people can and cannot do. It's hard to pass laws without a framework telling you how you can pass them, but it's even harder to enforce laws when all you have is a framework telling you how laws could come into being. 60 laws (and that's assuming that all 60 pieces of legislation have been laws)? That's a trickle. Iraq is centrally governed: the central government should be passing laws left and right to regulate all the things that Constitutions don't cover. You can't rely on common law when you've only been in existence for a year or two. So I'd hardly call that a great deal of work on the part of the legislature. If anything, it's a sign that there's so much fighting about laws that they can't be passed..

Two: even assuming that 60 laws in the period of time we're talking about is a large number, simply passing laws doesn't mean jack. The legislature of this country regularly passes laws which don't mean a thing. And we're not living in a state of civil war. If Congress wants to pass a law making terrorism illegal (I'm fairly sure they've done so) that will no more stop terrorists than passing a law making all other countries in the world give us all their money. It's an unenforceable law which only applies post-facto, when you're interested in throwing the book at a supposed terrorist. So if Iraq wants to pass all sorts of interesting (and probably useful) laws, that's fine, but they have to take into account that fact that they cannot enforce them..

Passing laws means agreement on paper. Enforcing laws means agreement on the street. When I see a little more of the former and a lot more of the latter, then I'll believe that its illustrative of anything that's "beginning to work." Since beginnings are notoriously bad metrics of quality, I'm not sure I can say how hopeful I'll find said beginning..