by Jonathan Power

Credit should always be given where credit is due: US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have come to terms with the Shiite ascendancy in Iraq. This was never on their agenda. At the outset of their war, they naively believed that the secular بmigrبs would grab the reins. Gracefully, they are bowing before the results of democracy.

The Shiites of Iraq are now facing the consequences of democracy as well. Unlike in Shiite Iran where democracy plays second fiddle to the religious authorities, the Shiite religious leaders of Iraq, in particular Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, seem ready to take a back seat. Like Bush and Blair, the Shiites are being compelled by the Iraqi voters to come to conclusions they may not at first have contemplated. They have won at the polls, but they have to deal with their rivals if it is to mean anything in the long run.

Islamic democracy gets a bad press in the West, yet the democratic impulse runs deep in the Muslim world. Although the democracy cause cannot point to any precise words of Islam's founder, the Prophet Mohammad came close to defining the concept when he gave the injunction to Muslim believers to consult among themselves, which led to the Islamic tradition of Shura. Christ, in as much as he addressed the subject at all, baldly told Christians to "render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's", at a time when his country was ruled by the Roman dictatorship.

Daily Star Editorial

It is always heartening to hear British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his foreign secretary, Jack Straw, remind us of how central the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is to peace and stability in the Middle East. We always appreciate hearing such words, for we've heard them quite frequently in recent years, and we'll probably keep hearing them in coming years. Jack Straw was very correct when he told the governing Labour Party's annual conference that there was no "greater challenge to international order than the terrible conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians."

Tony Blair for his part made it a point before the war on Iraq last year that the U.K. would spearhead a move to help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and see the creation of a Palestinian state. Well, the war in Iraq is still raging in a different form, and the British pledge continues to ring eloquently, if hollow. To be fair, Tony Blair certainly made an effort with George W. Bush to focus American diplomatic attention on the Palestine-Israel conflict, but he seems to have been rebuffed or ignored. He invested time and effort, and some political capital, on moving this issue forward, yet at the moment of truth he buckled and failed to deliver. With events in Iraq spinning out of control, the U.S. and U.K. are in the same leaky political boat, and the hostage issue adds further domestic pressure on a suddenly more vulnerable Blair.