By Neil the Ethical Werewolf It looks like the Iraqi Constitution is going to barely meet the requirements for passage -- majority support overall, and 1/3 support in at least 15 of the 18 provinces. I wish I could hope that this is a hopeful sign. The Sunnis came out fairly strongly against it, and it's unclear that they'll regard this as an election justly lost. And after reading the article that Kevin Drum linked about Shi'ites entering the Iraqi army for purpose of slaughtering Sunnis, it's hard to feel good about the future of interfaith relations in Iraq. My guess is that the majority of Americans still see Iraqi Muslims more or less as an cohesive ethnoreligious unit, and not as a strife-torn collection of Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds, and Turkomen. I'm pretty confident that this misperception will all-too slowly change, as so many false beliefs about Iraq have. It's this misperception of Iraqi unity that permits the president's "As Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down" nonsense. What if it's a bunch of Shi'ites who stand up, proudly donning Iraqi Army uniforms, and rushing off to kill some Sunnis? And as for leaving when the elected government tells us to -- what if the elected Shi'ite government encourages us to stay and make sure the Sunnis whom they've cut out of the oil wealth don't cause any trouble?
