Not enough "no" votes in Nineveh Province, and the Iraqi constitution passes. And the "Egg On Face Award" for Iraqi constitution vote prognostication goes to.......TPM Cafe, which just yesterday was predicting a likely defeat, and calling it "good for democracy?" Bloomberg News has more on the actual outcome:

Iraqis approved a new constitution that will establish a federal government, the next step in the country's transition to democracy after two decades of rule by Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. "It is an accomplishment for all Iraqis," Independent Electoral Commission spokesman Farid Ayar said today at a news conference in the capital, Baghdad, aired live by international broadcasters. "It's a civilized step that puts Iraq on the path to democracy, to rebuilding our new Iraq."

Almost 79 percent of Iraqi voters approved the charter, the commission said after the news conference in a statement in which it gave specifics of the vote. The proposal was passed in an Oct. 15 national referendum after opponents failed to muster a two-thirds majority in three of the country's 18 provinces, as required to defeat the measure....The outcome of the referendum hinged on the mainly Sunni Muslim northern province of Nineveh, which today was among last of the provinces to announce results. Fifty-five percent of Nineveh's voters rejected the charter. Voters in Sunni-dominated al-Anbar, in the west, rejected it by almost 97 percent, as did about 82 percent of voters in the majority-Sunni central province of Salahdin.

About 99 percent of voters backed the constitution in the northern Kurdish province of Arbil. In the southern Shiite Muslim province of Basra, 96 percent of voters approved it.

The Bloomberg story, of course, includes all the usual hedging and brow-furrowing about whether the country can truly become unified. Of course, final success is not assured, but is that really the point, for Allah's sake? The to-do list sounds pretty inspiring to me. Or would it be better if these challenges had never arisen; and Sunnis stayed fat and happy while Saddam added more Shiite corpses to his mass graves? This was but one gruesome face of the great and now-lamented "stability" Iraq enjoyed in the Saddam era.

The constitution establishes the nation as a federal, parliamentary republic with Islam as its official religion. Iraqis will choose a new National Assembly, which will sit for four years, in elections to be held by Dec. 15, under the U.S.-backed March 2004 Transitional Authority Law. Lawmakers will then select a cabinet, which must take office by Dec. 31. Its main task will be to interpret and add enforce the charter by dealing with disputes over oil revenue and the right to tax, central versus local authority, the role of Islam in the state, and the protection of civil liberties. A parliamentary panel will propose amendments to the text after the December vote, under an Oct. 12 agreement reached by Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite politicians.

Lamestream media coverage of the constitutional vote has been pretty awful. L. Brent Bozell III summarizes a recent study by his Media Research Center, here, noting:

Until the last few years, the phrase "Arab constitutional democracy" sounded like a pipe dream or an oxymoron....(yet)...The news pattern from Iraq has that familiar gloom to it. The process of building a constitutional democracy has been a story made in sessions of boring political blather, in a language Americans can't understand. Bombs blowing people up -- now that's action, great television. It doesn't require an interpreter. That's news....the news from Iraq can be utterly factual, but, in the selection of facts, be utterly biased. The overwhelming picture TV viewers get day in and day out, through this selectivity, is that Iraq is packed with chaos, a "mess."

Viewers should sense a political mission in the gloom. Demoralization over the "mess" in Iraq drags down Bush's approval rating, drives the numbers up when the network pollsters ask constantly whether the war is "worth the cost," and seems to revise history toward the Howard Dean view that deposing Saddam Hussein was a colossal mistake. They are right to assume that when reporters watch the Iraqis stream to the polls, they see sad puppets of the American president trying to put a happy-faced Post-It note on a disaster scene.

Ross Mackenzie, editorial page editor of The Richmond Times-Dispatch, writes that progress in Iraq is THE big story:

The vote evidently ratifying a new constitution demonstrated that al-Zarqawi's strategy is failing. Iraq's freedom experiment could well use more enthusiasm from Arab and Islamic supporters on the outside, but it may be approaching success. And the regime in Sunni Syria, easing the tasks of Iraqi terrorists and itself playing terror games in Lebanon, may be going onto the rocks.

Not only are Iraqis voting; several hundred thousand Iraqis who fled Saddamite Iraq have returned. The Iraqi currency, the dinar, trades stably in international currency markets. Iraqi property values are skyrocketing.

Writes the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin, editor of the Middle East Quarterly: "Beheadings and blood sell copy but do not accurately reflect Iraq. ... Bombings and body bags are tragic. But they do not reflect failure. Rather, they represent the sacrifice that both Iraqis and Americans have made for security and democracy. The referendum, refugee return, real estate and investment show much more accurately -- and objectively -- Iraq's slow but steady progress."So despite the nigglings of the naysaying "they," democracy in Iraq may be taking root. And certainly it's a dramatically more important story than who said what about someone named Valerie Plame.

Right on.

TECHNORATI TAGS: IRAQ, CONSTITUTION, MEDIA

TO COMMENT: The regular "comment" feature is not in operation. E-mail comments to address under "Contact" on main page masthead, and I'll add them, here.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at October 25, 2005 12:50 PM