Expect to see this headline over and over in coming weeks and months. Prior to Sunday the general sense you got from the media was that the united Shia slate was a monolith that would suck Iraq into a Iranian-backed theocracy. This was never true, and congratulations to the New York Times for finally acknowledging it today in Dexter Filkins’ front-pager. As he reports, half of the United Iraq Alliance’s 228 candidates aren’t affiliated with a political party and fewer than half a dozen of the candidates are clerics. And my understanding is that the slate is made up of 22 parties. Good luck holding all this together! Even if in the unlikely event that the united slate stays united it would need two-thirds of the seats in the assembly to dominate the Iraqi government single-handedly. The slate will do well, but probably won’t get there. Guess what that means? Compromise. Coalitions. Haggling. And it’s going to get messy. From our experience with Iraqi expatriate politics and with the Iraqi Governing Council we know that Iraqi politicians are prone to pushing things right to the edge, before reaching the last-minute deal that everyone deemed impossible. Brace yourself for Maureen Dowd columns complaining that all these elected Iraqis do is sit around and argue. And for all those “verge of collapse” headlines. Indeed, those headlines are familiar from another Middle Eastern country–Israel. Read the Times story with all its scenarios for Byzantine intrigue and its a like reading about Israeli domestic politics. Get used to it–this is what democratic politics is like, especially in the Middle East.