From a reader:

Subject: By Juan Cole’s logic, the US could be called “a white country”
One of the contentious issues between the Sunnis and everyone else is
whether or not Iraq should be designated “an Arab country” in the new
constitution. No surprise, he thinks that would be dandy (from Cole’s blog
today):
The diction in the constitution is that Iraq is part of the “Muslim world” but then it says that “its Arabs form part of the Arab world.” The Kurds objected to Iraq being called part of the Arab world, since they deeply resent the Baath Party’s attempt to Arabize them. I figure Iraq is about 74 percent Arab. Given their performance in the Jan. 30 elections, the Kurds must be at least 20 percent of the population. Then Turkmen are about 3 percent, and Chaldean/Assyrian Christians are another 3 percent (many speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus, at home). The rest are Arabs, whether Sunnis or Shiites. You could have called Iraq an Arab country with that profile.The US Bureau of the Census figures
(http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html ) that the US is 75.1%
white. Let’s run this logic by some non-white minorities and see how they’d feel about the US being defined as “a white country” in the US Constitution. Cole’s logic is so strong, I can’t imagine any complaints!