The Sunnis begin to play ball...

...and the newborn Iraqi democracy begins to crawl...


Iraq charter likely approved
Partial results show some Sunni support

Iraq's voters approved their first constitution since Saddam Hussein's ouster with help from some Sunnis, according to partial results released Sunday.

The vote, if confirmed when final results come in this week, will cement democratic institutions in a country that spent decades under dictatorship. Among the rights enshrined: free speech and equality under the law for all.
That most Iraqis would favor the charter was never in doubt. The majority Shiite Muslims and their Kurdish allies overwhelmingly backed the constitution.

But Sunnis, concentrated in four of Iraq's 18 provinces, worked to defeat it through a minority-protection provision in the rules. Even if a national majority voted “yes,” the referendum would fail if two-thirds majorities in any three provinces said “no.”

By Sunday, it appeared that two of the four provinces with large Sunni populations had voted “yes,” making adoption of the constitution a virtual certainty.

...or, as Washington's other newspaper puts it:

Those Pesky Freedom-Loving Iraqis Just Don't Care Enough About Western Elites' Opinion

For the Bush administration, the apparent approval of Iraq's constitution is less of a victory than yet another chance to possibly fashion a political solution that does not result in the bloody division of Iraq.

Publicly, administration officials hailed the result but privately some officials acknowledged that the road ahead is still very difficult, especially because Sunni Arab voters appeared to have rejected the constitution by wide margins. As one official put it, every time the administration appears on the edge of a precipice, it manages to cobble together a result that allows it to move on to the next precipice.