not to minimize the giffords shooting or its inevitable political fallout here in the u.s., but it looks like that story is eclipsing yesterday's vote in sudan.
that vote is a really an important event. for quite a while the civil war in south sudan was one of the world's more intractable festering problems. the 2005 peace agreement brokered by the u.s. was the bush administration's only real foreign policy accomplishment, lying among the wreckage of countless bush-era foreign policy disasters. just the fact that the vote seemed to be largely violence-free is nothing short of amazing given the personalities of the people involved.
the fact that the peace deal might actually hold and the south could peacefully secede is a major deal. it's success (if indeed it does succeed) would be a testament to the potential of the kind of engagement that the GOP otherwise tends to turn its nose up to. the reason the bush administration was willing to do it in this case was itself an unusual quirk in american domestic politics. because the christian (although really christian and animist) south was being oppressed by the muslim fundamentalist north, american evangelicals got the bush administration to try constructive engagement in a way that administration wasn't willing to try anywhere else.
