A Little Patience, Please: Iraq won't look like Our Town overnight.

The absolute monarchs of the op-ed pages and television commentary predicted fearful outcomes to the Iraqi Freedom operation -- hundreds of thousands of casualties on all sides, Baghdad razed, the Muslim world in an uproar, every Arab an Osama bin Laden. Well, things haven't turned out like that. President Bush and his administration explained what they would do, and did it. Unwilling to give credit where credit is due, the absolute monarchs have moved on to predict fresh fearful outcomes -- a Khomeinist dictatorship of the Shia ayatollahs, an intifada against the American "occupation," every Arab once again an Osama bin Laden. What is most striking in this immense failure: the bias against the administration, the ignorance, or the contrast with the professionalism of the military?

When a totalitarian regime is overthrown, the very first likelihood is the settling of scores. In 1945 concentration-camp survivors killed their SS guards when they could. In Budapest during the revolution of 1956, the crowds hanged Communist secret policemen on lampposts. In a final showdown with the Communists, even the newly democratic Boris Yeltsin left many dead when his tanks shelled the Moscow White House.

Since the days of the British, moreover, every previous change of regime in Iraq has involved mayhem and murder. Nothing of the kind has occurred so far in Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, Arabs massacred Kurds and drove them out of Mosul and Kirkuk, stealing their homes and property. Reclaiming what is rightfully theirs, the Kurds have not killed those who so maltreated them. In Basra, the mob caught a notorious secret-police chief; they did not lynch him as they might have, but handed him over to the British. The families of victims are often able to name and identify the Ba'athist secret policemen and torturers who committed crimes against them. Many of them expressed their feelings by looting whatever of the former regime's real or symbolic property was within reach, but they have not taken the law into their own hands in revenge killings. That is remarkable, and grounds for hope.

Life is instead approaching normality. Former general Jay Garner and his staff of several hundred have teamed up with Iraqi officials and technicians. The electricity supply will soon be fully restored in all major cities, and with it comes clean water and the purification of sewage. There is no hunger; markets are operating. Gas stations are open. Schoolchildren no longer have to glorify Saddam in class. The regular police force is back at work, in new uniforms, armed and using weapons handed to them by Americans to enforce good conduct. Military lawyers are trying to establish interim criminal and civil codes. Economists are debating what the post-Saddam currency ought to be.

Administration is not government, and in that respect Iraq is still a political vacuum. For reasons that seem to have to do with departmental in-fighting in Washington, the United States did not prepare for an Iraqi government-in-waiting. Power is therefore lying in the streets -- to adopt the famous phrase coined for the Bolsheviks in 1917 -- and someone has only to pick it up. All sorts of contenders with all sorts of credentials have rushed forward, each with claims to be representing one or another of the ethnicities and religious sects which make up the kaleidoscope of Iraq. Some of these contenders are at the national level -- for instance Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and known to have the Pentagon's backing but also the blocking of the State Department -- others at regional or city levels. Out of the blue, one Muhammad Mohsen Zubaidi appointed himself mayor of Baghdad and set up so many committees to deal with municipal issues that the military has put a stop to his activities.

Other contenders still are tribal elders or sheikhs accustomed to authority and respect. The traditional Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani speak for their people, and make it clear that Kurds expect to be rewarded for their loyalty to the coalition, as well as their restraint towards a Turkey unhappy to see the Kurds enjoying freedom. For the past decade, they have shown themselves capable of running Iraqi Kurdistan at least as democratically as the Turks run Turkey: not perfectly, but not too imperfectly either.

Representing only about a fifth of the population, Sunni Muslims have hitherto governed Iraq. Ba'athist ideology began as an unholy compound of Communism and Nazism, and ended as the justification of Sunni rule over everyone else. For the Sunni minority, the downfall of Saddam is a calamity marking the end of their supremacy, and putting them in fear of their lives at the hands of those they oppressed. A would-be Sunni successor to Saddam needs the unusual credential of having stood up to Saddam, and enough civic courage to tell his fellow Sunnis how blindly cruel they have been while in power. Had the State Department been able to find such a paragon, an Iraqi government-in-waiting might have accompanied the Marines.

In Iraq, Shia outnumber Sunnis by about three to one. In neighboring Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors have attempted to widen Shi'ism into some sort of universal Islamist weapon against the West, in particular the American "Great Satan." To Saddam, the Shia were fanatics in the grip of religious frenzy, and as a precaution he banned traditional Shia processions and rituals in their holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. The State Department evidently views the Shia much as Saddam did. Mercilessly persecuting their own Shia minority, the Saudis also contribute to this unspoken coalition to keep Shia down everywhere.

The fall of Saddam gives the Iraqi Shia a sense of freedom and power, for the first time in their history. Large numbers of the faithful took to the streets to revive their traditional processions and rituals, in which they flagellate themselves and mutilate themselves with swords and knives. The blood-drenched spectacle confirmed everything the State Department dreads. Some spokesman from the Hawza -- a seminary which acts as the main Shia powerhouse in Karbala -- then openly declared, "We want to establish an Islamic, Shia state, the same as happened in Iran." Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly declared that the United States was not prepared to see Iranian-style dictatorship replace Saddam's dictatorship. Gen. Garner takes the same line.

Iran has sent representatives and undercover agents to work for an Iraq in Shia hands. The media monarchs draw the instant conclusion that another Shia extremist state must be in the making. But the Shia are not in fact a bloc of undifferentiated fanatics. Their ayatollahs depend on genealogy and learning for authority. The most authoritative is Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf, a man well into his seventies. First he advised everyone not to resist the coalition, and then he declared he would not "interfere in the type of government the Iraqi people wish to choose." Other ayatollahs have followers or factions but their political ambitions and capacities for violence cancel each other out.

In a further division, many Shia -- including Ahmad Chalabi and most of the INC -- have a Western secular outlook. It is not clear whether the State Department objects to Chalabi because of his personality, his career, or the fact that he is a Shia rather than a Sunni. By luck rather than judgment, this hostility to him may still turn out to be for the best. Should he in the end be the man to pick up the power lying in the streets, he will have done so on his own, not as an American stooge.

It hardly takes a Locke or a Montesquieu to see that the coherent way to fill the political vacuum is to convene a constituent assembly. Every ethnic and religious entity should send its representatives, some of whom no doubt will be self-selected, and a few may well try to be wreckers. Time and patience are the prerequisites for reaching agreement to share power among so many identities and interests. Gen. Garner speaks of a process lasting a few months, after which he will be handing responsibility for government over to Iraqis. Chalabi and the intellectuals of the INC hope that a constituent assembly will come up with the blueprint for a federal system of government, but expect that the details won't be settled for at least two years.

Nazi Germany took ten years to become a Federal Republic, and Russia is still shaking off some of the Soviet legacy after more than a decade. Iraq will do well to match that sort of timescale. American forces will have to stay for as long as it takes to preserve the peace and guarantee the workability of the new government. Of course in the event that someone from whatever background picks up power to make himself another Supreme Leader at the expense of everyone else, then all bets are off, and for once the media might be right to expect the worst.