LET’S HEAR IT for purple ink, for 9,765,000 Iraqis — the 63 per cent of the electorate who have just passed judgment on the messy, confusing tissue of compromises that passes for an Iraqi constitution. Yes, and let’s hear it too for the minority, mostly Sunni, who rejected the constitution; because the point is that, having mostly stayed home in last January’s elections, millions of them now understand that staying away from the polling booths is a mug’s game.

Look for a moment at Anbar, western heartland of the insurgency. All but 2 per cent boycotted the January parliamentary elections; this time, 32 per cent cast their votes. Let’s hear it for Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Iraq, who by pulling off a last-minute compromise that makes this constitution almost limitlessly amendable, convinced the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni group, that the political game is there to be played. That is the key, the Americans now realise, to a political order that can hold. Iraq’s Kurds and Shia leaders have shown that this is something they too understand.

The passage of this constitution in 16 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, by 79 per cent to 21 per cent, is a milestone. It is simplistic to dismiss the result as sectarian, because the document satisfied no constituency. People voted for it as a stepping-stone to the battle that really matters: the parliamentary elections on December 15 that will decide not on forms of words, but on the distribution of actual political power.

Since the euphoria of their first chance at the vote last January, thousands of Iraqis have lost limbs and lives at the hands of terrorists and insurgents bent on inciting civil war. They have chafed under a weak, bickering Government that most Iraqis would say has done precious little to improve their lives. Yet even more people voted this time than in January.

The robustness of the Iraqi commitment to the political process is beyond remarkable. So listen, you defeatists and cynics who said that this couldn’t be done, shouldn’t even be attempted: however confused the outcome may be, the democracy that you patronisingly declared that Iraqis could never handle is taking shape. By all means sneer when Bush and Blair talk about progress, but lay off the Iraqi people. They are not the benighted fools you took them for; and their courage puts us all to shame.