HALF FULL, MAYBE THREE QUARTERS...:

Democracy, Closer Every Day (NOAH FELDMAN, September 24, 2003, NY Times)

Essentially all of Iraq's Shiite Muslims and Kurds, who between them make up 80 percent of the population, were happy to see Saddam Hussein go and have made it clear that they want the coalition to remain long enough to prevent the Baath party from re-emerging.

Thus the main internal threat comes from Sunni Arabs, who have long held power despite being only about 15 percent of the population. Yet even if many of these Sunnis want the coalition out, only a few seem so far to be willing to take up arms -- otherwise we would be seeing thousands of incidents each week rather than a handful. Perhaps the greatest concern is the possibility that some attacks have been initiated by terrorists controlled by Iran or Al Qaeda who have infiltrated Iraq's essentially unguarded borders.

Still, the answer to this threat isn't bringing in foreign troops or putting more Americans on the ground, but creating an effective Iraqi security force -- fast. [...]

More important to the future of democracy in Muslim Iraq, the senior Shiite religious leaders, and the political parties loosely associated with them, have consistently eschewed divisive rhetoric in favor of calls for Sunni-Shiite unity. Most have repeatedly asserted their desire for democratic government respectful of Islamic values, rather than government by mullahs on the failed Iranian model. As a result, they have been largely successful in marginalizing younger radicals like the rejectionist Moktada al-Sadr. When Mr. Sadr organized an anti-coalition protest in the holy city of Najaf in July, he was forced to bus in supporters from Baghdad, three dusty hours away. (Wisely, the coalition has declined to arrest Mr. Sadr; his hopes for a living martyrdom denied, he increasingly looks more like a small-time annoyance than the catalyst of a popular movement.)

The emergence of democratic attitudes among religiously committed Shiites was underscored on Saturday in Detroit when Ibrahim Jafari, leader of the Islamist Dawa Party and the most recent Iraqi Governing Council member to hold its rotating presidency, addressed the second annual Iraqi-American Conference. The largely Christian audience of Iraqi-Americans spent the morning worrying about the dangers of a constitution declaring Islam the official religion of Iraq, but then treated Dr. Jafari to a standing ovation after he made the case for a pluralistic, tolerant Iraq in which all citizens -- Muslim and non-Muslim, men and women -- would have full rights of citizenship.

The same proud insistence on the compatibility of Islamic values and a democratic Iraq was sounded last week in Bahrain by 40 Iraqi Shiites at a program on constitutional values sponsored by the American Bar Association. Skeptical of arguments for a strong separation of religion and state, these representatives nonetheless took as a given that a country as religiously diverse as Iraq must ensure religious freedom -- mandated, they said, by the Koran -- and equality for all citizens.

The likelihood is that the Democratic candidate for president will mention neither Iraq nor the economy during the general campaign.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 24, 2003 8:53 AM