Does Iraq have an official state religion?

If it does not, that makes it a secular state.

So why, Dave, do you think you can just set the secular to one side?

The US is also a secular nation. We do not use religion to justify capital punishment.

Now, plenty of Americans use their private faith to rationalize that capital punishment is morally right or morally wrong. But that doesn't mean they can set aside secular arguments--for or against--aside.

Your suggestion that secular governments need not look for secular legal arguments is...disturbing, to say the least. Fundamentalist religious views are not the tenets upon which secular nations are founded. Period.