NASIRIYAH, Iraq – This provincial capital 200 miles southwest of Baghdad is the quietest region in Iraq. There has yet to be an attack on coalition forces here. It is worth examining why.

This city of 360,000 has narrow, traffic-choked streets crammed with one-story storefront bazaars. Nasiriyah looks as though it hasn’t changed much since the days of British rule, except for the buildings along the Euphrates that were shelled into rubble during the March battle with hard-line Saddam troops.

The city sits in the heartland of Iraq’s Shiite Muslims, a vast area of flat desert terrain and marshland, whose outlying towns and villages are inhabited by Shiite tribes that were brutally repressed by Saddam and rejoiced at his fall. So there is good reason why coalition troops here – mainly Italians – are not being blown up.

Despite their unease at occupation, local tribal and religious leaders are willing to tolerate coalition troops until a new Iraqi government is elected. In fact, they don’t want those troops to leave until elections are held.

The situation in Nasiriyah is perhaps the best example of the tenuous balance in much of Iraq between the Iraqi public’s patience to wait out occupation and the suspicion that it will not bring the desired results – a free and prosperous new Iraq. As long as the patience of Shiites in Nasiriyah holds, the Bush administration has a chance to produce a positive outcome in Iraq. How to maintain that patience is the key.

Seeking answers, I visited a leading Nasiriyah cleric, Shaikh Muhammad Baqir al-Nasiri, in a downtown mosque. Passing through a crush of supplicants, I wore a full-length black abaya and black headscarf as I entered his book-lined office. This tall, spare bespectacled white-bearded cleric in white turban and long black cloak embodies America’s hopes and perils in Iraq.

Nasiri fled into exile in the late 1970s under a Saddam death threat and returned to Iraq just after the end of the fighting in April. He organized local Shiites to put down looters and get the city running again and has established a position as the city’s leading cleric.

But he has refused to participate directly in the city council selected from local notables by occupation authorities. He is scornful of the interim Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad because it wasn’t elected. And yet, Nasiri is not unwilling to deal with the occupation authorities.

“I will cooperate in the humanitarian area,” he says, but “not in the political and military area.”

To gain his full support, the Bush administration must facilitate a political process in Iraq that the public feels is legitimate. Item number one: He wants delegates to an assembly that will draft the Iraqi constitution to be elected. So far, occupation authorities prefer that these delegates be chosen from Iraqi professional and religious associations.

Nasiri says this isn’t good enough. The Iraqi public must feel it owns the constitution, and for this, he says, real elections are necessary.

“We aren’t against the American people,” he insists. “We just want to be free. The people will accept a constitution if they believe it is written by the Iraqi people.”

This is much more than an academic argument. The top Shiite clerics, based in the holy city of Najaf, also insist on elections for constitutional delegates. U.S. officials fear that such elections would be chaotic and too time-consuming. But Nasiri says they are essential to confirm to Iraqis – especially the majority, who are Shiites – that they, not the Americans, will control their new political process.

“If you don’t help the Shiite moderates, you help the extremes,” he says, referring to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has little support in Najaf but is trying to make trouble for occupation forces.

Nasiri himself says he believes in “full constitutional democracy” and will “accept any result that is elected,” including a secular government. He says the Koran says that you cannot force religion on people.

The message from this moderate shaikh is that American officials have to find a way to convince Shiites in Nasiriyah that the political process they are godfathering is legitimate and not manipulated for American interests. He is open to some compromise on the formula.

The bottom line: If U.S. officials come up with the proper political formulation, Nasiriyah and the bulk of Iraqi Shiites are likely to tolerate occupation until a constitution is written and elections are held.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.