Something better.(The Middle East)

TURMOIL in the Middle East--what else is new? Only this: that the current turmoil may mark underlying shifts in the region's dynamics.

Iraq's electoral commission formally certified the results of the January 30 vote. The largely Shiite United Iraqi Alliance will have 140 out of 275 seats in the constitution-writing National Assembly, well shy of the two-thirds needed to pick the leadership. They will have to deal with the Kurds (75 seats) or outgoing prime minister Ayad Allawi (40 seats). The horse-trading has begun, in rooms filled, not with smoke, but with tiny cups of tea. Even some Sunni insurgents--greedy enough to be murderers, but realistic enough not to be fanatical about it--reportedly want in on the action. The spectacle of politicking is almost as heartening as the more inspiring performance of Iraqi voters.

In Israel, the region's sturdiest democracy, Ariel Sharon has put his long career, and conceivably his life, behind a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Sharon's calculation is that Gaza was impossible to control and impossible to assimilate; so too was it impossible to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority. He decided to move on his own. With the providential death of Yasser Arafat, perhaps the Palestinians have decided to move too. Mahmoud Abbas met Sharon for a summit. Perhaps that could be dismissed as a photo-op--but Abbas also fired security personnel after Hamas lobbed mortar shells at the retreating Israelis; Arafat never did so much.

Lebanon had a democracy of a kind, based on a carefully rigged census, until the mid-Seventies, when the country became the sport of the PLO, Israel, and Syria. The Syrians essentially took over, dictating governments and battening on Lebanese businesses. Acoalition of Sunni Muslims, Druzes, and Maronite Christians tired of their subjection. Bashar Assad--a bad argument for hereditary dictatorships--recently sought to thwart them by assassinating Rafiq Hariri, one of their leaders, in a spectacular bombing on the Beirut corniche. Hariri's murder and ...