John Tabin wrote to point out his column in the American Specator, which, as he said, draws heavily on an excellent post by Deacon in the wake of the Iraqi election, titled “Keeping the Faith.”
Mr. Tabin picks up where Deacon left off:
Mirengoff went on to note that the next step in faith-keeping would be for the Shiites to develop a constitution that respects Sunni Arab interests. The Shiites seem to be doing even better than that: Adel Abdel-Mehdi, the current finance minister and a leading candidate to be the next prime minister — he’s a powerful figure in the coalition, likely to dominate the National Assembly, endorsed by Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani — has said in an interview that his faction is “really willing to offer the maximum,” short of demanding a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal, to Sunni Arab political groups, including bringing them into the process of crafting the constitution. The political calculation is simple: The constitution cannot be ratified if it is rejected by two-thirds or more voters in three provinces, and Sunni Arab leaders may thus be able to scuttle a constitution they don’t like. Sistani, for his part, according to a profile in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, has been spending a lot of time studying constitutions, including the American, French, and German constitutions and the unwritten constitution of Britain, in an effort to get it right.
The battle is far from over in Iraq, obviously. But, amazingly enough, it’s just possible that things may turn out pretty well there.
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