Indiana Alumni Magazine
Founding Father
Earlier this year, an IU-educated lawyer returned to the country of his childhood to help hammer out a framework for the new Iraqi state.
By Evan Osnos
MAN OF TWO COUNTRIES — Feisal Istrabadi, BA’86, JD’88, is an Indiana attorney, husband, and father — and a framer of Iraq’s new constitution.
Photo: Stephanie Sinclair.
This lawyer is no diplomat. His previous office was in Valparaiso, Ind., and his pinstripe suits look more at home in tax court than a compound guarded by men with AK-47s.
But earlier this year Feisal Istrabadi, BA'86, JD'88, emerged as the improbably pivotal player in the high-stakes drama of fashioning Iraq's interim constitution. He parsed every comma and clause on the most explosive questions of religion, power, and territory that will either tie Iraq together or split it asunder.
"I'm no James Madison," he said wearily in February, after another night of negotiating well past midnight.
As the legal adviser to a top Iraqi politician, Istrabadi has drawn admiration from U.S. and Iraqi officials for his plain-spoken determination to settle the most sensitive debates. When a routine malpractice case nearly pulled him back to the United States at a critical stage of the negotiations, Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, intervened to win a delay, fearing Istrabadi's absence could derail the constitutional talks.
Behind Istrabadi's mission to Iraq is the story of a 41-year-old suburban father of two driven by a divided identity: a man with deep Iraqi roots consumed with reviving the country of his ancestors, and an American increasingly distressed by what he sees as critical U.S. missteps that threaten the chances for delivering democracy to Iraq.
"The United States didn't arrive ready for the job at hand," Istrabadi said. "It came here with a variety of mistaken assumptions. It has paid the price, and the people of Iraq have paid the price for those mistakes."
Those who have watched Istrabadi evolve from a little-known adviser to Iraqi politician Adnan Pachachi to an important voice in the future of the country say his devotion reflects a deep belief that Iraq's future hangs in the balance.
"Above all, he feels that the U.S. should be held to promises it made to the Iraqi people," said Noah Feldman, a New York University professor who advised the U.S.-led coalition on devising an Iraqi constitution. "He immediately struck me as someone who was very politically and legally sophisticated."
Known officially as the "transitional administrative law," Iraq's interim constitution was among the toughest hurdles to conquer as Iraq prepares to regain sovereignty on July 1. The transitional law is expected to form the basis for a final document in 2005.
Bound by a Feb. 28 deadline for the document, Istrabadi and a group of other core negotiators met for weeks this past winter to thrash out the details.
The approved version of the constitution detailed a parliamentary system led by a prime minister and a presidency. To satisfy ethnic and sectarian demands, the presidency could be composed of three to five rotating members.
Istrabadi and the other negotiators struck fragile compromises on divisive issues, including granting broad autonomy to the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, something that Kurdish leaders have demanded and many Arabs have opposed. The constitutional framers also heeded hard-line Muslims' calls that Islam be acknowledged as a source of legislation, but have stopped short of recognizing religion as the principal source of Iraqi law.
Other questions remain unsolved, including the composition of the interim government that will take charge on June 30, a method for disarming private militias, and a mechanism for holding elections. The transitional law calls for nationwide elections no later than Jan. 31, 2005.
Throughout the discussions, observers say, Istrabadi emerged as a strong advocate for protections against civil-rights abuses and corruption. He insisted on banning torture for all detainees. He proposed a presidential veto as a safeguard against power-grabbing by parliament.
And in his boldest push, Istrabadi argued that women, who have never had a voice in Iraqi government, should be guaranteed 40 percent of the seats in the first legislature. The approved version of the constitution called for 25 percent of the national assembly's seats be guaranteed for women.
This winter's constitutional negotiations did not mark the first time that an Istrabadi has helped pen the founding documents of Iraq. Part of a long line of administrators and officials, Feisal Istrabadi had a paternal grandfather, Mahmoud, who was a member of the assembly that wrote Iraq's first constitution in 1925.
When a military coup overthrew the monarchy in 1958, Feisal Istrabadi's parents immigrated to the U.S.
Born in Virginia, Feisal Istrabadi returned with his family to live in Iraq for several years, until he was 8. There he saw his first searing glimpse of Saddam Hussein's brutality.
"One of my strongest memories of Baghdad was the televised mass public execution by hanging of 13 men — one of whom was 19 years old — predominantly Jews. They broadcast it on the Islamic equivalent of Christmas Eve," he said over tea in his office, surrounded by blast walls and armed guards. "That left a profound impact on all of us who watched it."
The family soon moved back to the U.S., to Bloomington, Ind., where his mother, Amel Istrabadi, was enrolled in an IU Ph.D. program.
Istrabadi's Iraqi roots faded somewhat as he assumed the life of an American high-school student. But, he told a reporter for the Bloomington Herald-Times, "I'm not sure I had a typical teenage experience. I don't know that I ever fit into the general culture, and I still don't."
Istrabadi chose IUB for college, lived at home, and studied chemistry. By the time he went on to law school, also at IUB, he had lost any hint of a foreign accent and barely even thought of himself as Iraqi.
That all changed in 1991, when he watched bombs falling on Baghdad, and grew increasingly concerned about suffering in the country he had left behind. He went on to spend several years lobbying to loosen sanctions on Iraq.
In 2002, amid the growing prospect of war in Iraq, Istrabadi joined the Future of Iraq project, a U.S. State Department-sponsored effort to draw on Iraq experts and expatriates for help in postwar planning. The group produced hundreds of pages of analysis, but in what has since become famous as a critical failure, the Defense Department shelved the project's conclusions. Among the findings, the project warned that looting and disorder after combat could impede the progress toward reconstruction.
"It was a horrendous mistake," Istrabadi says of the failure to heed the project's conclusions.
As U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad and the city fell into chaos, Istrabadi felt a pull to return to the country of his boyhood and his ancestors. Late in April 2003, Istrabadi said goodbye to his wife, Juliet Graver Istrabadi, MA'90, their two daughters, and his small Indiana law practice, so he could travel to Baghdad, the first of three long trips to the seething capital.
In a city awash in diplomats, Istrabadi's trial-lawyer style stood out during the weeks he worked on the constitution. At his first meeting with one of Bremer's deputies, he asked the official if he had read about the British occupation of Iraq, because the official appeared intent on repeating every mistake they had made.
Istrabadi was reunited with his family and his American life in mid-March. As he settles back into the life of an Indiana attorney and family man, he says he feels deeply satisfied with the accomplishments of the constitutional framers.
"Despite competing agendas,"
he told the Herald-Times, "these 25
people were able to hammer out a
pretty damn good document." 
Evan Osnos is a Middle East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, where a version of this story originally appeared. He is based in Cairo and frequently writes from Iraq.