Of the Iraqis, by the Iraqis …

However flawed, the Iraqi election is undeniably “a grand moment in Iraqi history,” as President Bush put it.

The question is, what kind of moment? It will be years, if not decades, before we know if this is the first step toward a stable, democratic Iraq. What is more certain is that this is a moment to redress injustices of historic proportions.

For Iraq’s Shia Arabs and its Kurds, this election is a means to end oppression at the hands of the country’s Sunni Arab minority. The Baath party dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was only the latest, though certainly the most brutal, in a long travail of Sunni rule.

The United States and its armed forces are the instrument of this deliverance. But the architect of this election moment is a reclusive, Iranian-born, 75-year-old Shiite cleric, the most revered religious leader in Iraq: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

At every step, Sistani frustrated the plans of the U.S. occupation to write its own version of a constitution, install a compliant Iraqi administration, and put off direct elections.

For Sistani, whose edicts carry the force of law for most Shiites, an election was the quickest route to power and to creation, as his aide described it, of a “democratic Islamic state.”

In June 2003, Sistani issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, stating that Iraq’s constitution could only be written by an elected body, not one appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority headed by Ambassador Paul Bremer. The United States backed down.

In November, Sistani issued another statement opposing Bremer’s plan to form an Iraqi government through a system of regional caucuses held under U.S. auspices. A legitimate government could only come from direct elections, held under U.N. direction, he declared.

For Bremer, the realization “that Shiite clerics would be the most important political players in American-occupied Iraq … was not a happy discovery,” wrote Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA analyst and conservative scholar.

In January 2004, Sistani sent hundreds of thousands of supporters to the streets. Bremer yielded, ultimately agreeing to virtually all of Sistani’s conditions. Later that summer, Sistani stepped in to stop the U.S. assault on Shiite radicals in Najaf. Then the ayatollah and his men negotiated the formation of a united Shiite electoral slate, the United Iraqi Alliance. Its main competitor for control of a new 275-seat national assembly, which will write Iraq’s constitution, is a U.S.-favored slate headed by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

For many Shiites, a vote for the united slate is a crucial step in redressing historical grievances that go back more than a millennium. Modern history begins with a 1920 revolt against British rule betrayed by the Sunni elite allied with the occupier. It continues with a 1991 post-Persian Gulf War revolt against Saddam’s rule, taken up in the mistaken belief that the United States would back it. Instead the Americans stood by while more than 100,000 Shiites were massacred by Saddam’s Republican Guards.

Vote for the Shiite list, a poster exhorted voters in southern Iraq, “so that we don’t repeat the tragedy.” The Kurds, who will vote for their own slate, have their own tales of revolt, betrayal and massacre.

The Sunni failure to participate in this election is troubling, but not surprising. They understand their rule of Iraq is at stake. But Gerecht argues persuasively in a recent American Enterprise Institute paper, “Islamic Paradox,” that the Shiite clerics are now the most important instrument of change in the Middle East. Iran’s Shiite revolution in 1979 is now superseded by Iraq’s.

“These men, not the much-admired liberal Muslim secularists who are always praised and sometimes defended by the American government and press, are the United States’ most valuable potential democratic allies,” he writes.

“Nonetheless,” he also cautions, “the march of democracy in the Middle East is likely to be very anti-American.”

That may be evident in Iraq soon enough. “Once elections are over, we have fulfilled our historical role in Sistani’s eyes and need to leave,” predicts Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council and a specialist on the Islamic world.

Americans owe Iraqi Shia and Kurds a measure of justice. Beyond that, let the revolution begin.