Iraqi Constitution Approved

Iraq - Iraq's landmark constitution was adopted fairly by a majority of voters during the country's Oct. 15 referendum, as Sunni Arab opponents failed to muster enough support to defeat it, election officials said Tuesday. A prominent Sunni politician called the vote "a farce."

Results released by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq after a 10-day-audit showed that Sunni Arabs, who had sharply opposed the draft document, failed to produce the two-thirds "no" vote they would have needed in at least three of Iraq's 18 provinces to defeat it.

Farid Ayar, an official with the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq who announced the results, said the commission's audit of the vote had turned up no significant fraud.

Carina Perelli, the U.N. elections chief, also praised a "very good job" with the audit and said "Iraq should be proud of the commission."

But Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni Arab member of the committee that drafted the constitution, called the referendum "a farce" and accused government forces of stealing ballot boxes to reduce the percentage of "no" votes in several mostly Sunni-Arab provinces.

"The people were shocked to find out that their vote is worthless because of the major fraud that takes place in Iraq," he said on Al-Arabiya TV.

Nationwide, 78.59 percent voted for the charter while 21.41 percent voted against, the commission said. The charter required a simple majority nationwide with the provision that if two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces rejected it, the constitution would be defeated.

Two mostly Sunni Arab provinces — Salahuddin and Anbar — had voted against the constitution by at least a two-thirds vote. The commission, which had been auditing the referendum results for 10 days, said a third province where many Sunnis live — Ninevah — produced a "no" vote of only 55 percent.

Ninevah had been a focus of fraud allegations since preliminary results showed a large majority of voters had approved the constitution, despite a large Sunni Arab population there.

Election commission officials and U.N. officials, who also took part in the audit, "found no cases of fraud that could affect the results of the vote," Ayar said.

And with that, the Iraqi constitution was approved. Don't expect it to be set in stone, as there is a method to propose and adopt amendments.

It's another step on the path of progress.

UPDATE:
Newsbusters reports that some of the major media outlets are downplaying the significance of the approval. Why? Approving the Constitution is a big deal, but you wouldn't know it from the kind of coverage it receives. That's not to say that it wasn't a busy news day with the hurricane aftermath, bad weather in the Northeast, and the bombings in Baghdad. But to give more time to stranded whales that beached themselves than the approval of the constitution? Curious.

UPDATE:
Hitchens slams the media for failing to see the forest through the trees. In fact, he slams the media for not being able to recognize the trees either. Iraqi isn't comprised of Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurds, but Shi'a and Sunni and Christians as religious groups, and Kurds, Persians, and Iraqis as cultural groups. Thus, the election was supported by a majority of Sunnis because most Kurds are Sunni Muslims. It was the Sunni Iraqi population that had opposed the Constitution, in part because they were the minority group that begat Saddam Hussein and are worried about their standing in the future Iraq.