ALMOST A PEACEFUL DAY, The Times reports:

AMID unexpected calm, millions of Iraqis turned out in the sunshine yesterday to vote on a new constitution whose advocates claimed it would unite the country in a progressive democracy but whose critics warned that it would ultimately prove divisive.

You don't say! They have been predicting failure are every step; how people are still buying the forecasts coming from people who have been consistently erring all along still amazes me.

Whatever the result (and I think the high turnout in Sunni areas is a good sign) yesterday was a huge, huge success that even anti-war Spain couldn't deny (though the MSM did its best to hide it, not putting the news in their first page or in the beginning of the newscasts). If there's a yes vote, it's obviously good. If there's a no vote from the Sunni areas and is big enough to derail the constitution, the whole thing will go back to the drawing table, which is not a bad thing in itself. That's politics, baby.

Besides, the fact that a proposed Constitution gets a thumb down by the voters in a certain area doesn't necessarily mean that the whole entity crumbles down deligitimized. Just ask France. Is the European constitution dead because the vote was negative there or the Netherlands? I personally would hope so, but that's not what the European elites are saying. Yes, the same European elites that now are saying that if there's a negative result in certain parts of Iraq it will prove that the whole country goes nowhere.

So if someone tells me that Iraq's democratization process is a failure because some Sunni regions voted against it, I'll answer using Zapatero's words after the French Non: "it's a setback, but not a catastrophe"! (link in Spanish).

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