Thirty days from now, Iraq is supposed to have a draft constitution. It now looks medium-likely that will happen and that the draft will then be voted for in a referendum in October, which if it is ratified will be followed by Iraq's first full election in January next year.
The whole process is being monitored and cajolled along by US and UK diplomats. Both countries are anxious to find a credible escape route from an Iraqi occupation which has proven unpopular, messy, expensive and deadly.
To succeed properly, the upcoming political process will have to include a great deal of "mending fences" between the Sunni community on one hand and Kurdish and Shia groups on the other. It will also have to establish Iraqi independence to make it's way as it's own nation. It will have to help defuse the current level of violence to a level at which Iraqis will vote for a system that is demonstrably providing greater security and finally the current government must show it can improve the nations economic woes if it wants to be re-elected.
Against this background then, it is worrying (to say the least) to hear reports such as that of Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Taluto, commander of coalition forces in four provinces that include the key cities of Tikrit, Kirkuk and Samarra, who says that Kurdish and Sunni groups of "religious extremists" are now co-operating in his area of command. This new development has paralleled the shift away from attacks on Coalition and Iraqi security forces towards attacks on "soft targets" i.e. civilian Iraqis, all across Iraq.
The UK's rightwing Telegraph newspaper recounts the statistics:
In the past fortnight, the senior Egyptian diplomat in Iraq has been kidnapped and murdered, and there have been assassination attempts on the Pakistani and Bahraini ambassadors.
On Wednesday, 27 people, most of them children, were killed in a car bombing in Baghdad, and yesterday terrorists had the gall to fire on an Iraqi television crew travelling to the funerals of some of the victims, and to attack the heavily fortified main entrance to the Green Zone in the capital.
According to the interior ministry, 8,175 Iraqi civilians and police officers were killed by rebels between August and May, that is, a rate of more than 800 a month. And the figure includes neither Iraqi soldiers nor civilians who died during American military operations.
Add to this the news that in Basra in the South, armed militias are establishing what is effectively a mini-Iran, a theocracy where woman are attacked and killed, musical instruments are banned and pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini have become a common sight.
The city's 41-seat political authority is dominated by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri).
This has close links to the Iranian government, and those loyal to Ayatollah Muhammad Yacoubi, a radical cleric friendly with Moqtada al-Sadr whose Mahdi army staged two uprisings last summer.
The local Sciri leader, Furat al-Shara, said last month that there was no need to enshrine Islamic law in the country's legal code because this was already being done "culturally".
In Basra, the chief of police, recently admitted that he had lost control of the majority of his officers because of penetration of the force by members of the militias and says he trusts "25 per cent of my force, no more".
Which doesn't bode well for Us and UK hopes that Iraqi security forces will soon (with a year) be able to take over whole responsibility for counter-insurgency and normal policy or defense duties.
Nor does the news that The Iraqi armed forces are full of "ghost battalions" in which officers pocket the pay of soldiers who never existed or have gone home.
"I know of at least one unit which was meant to be 2,200 but the real figure was only 300 men," said a veteran Iraqi politician and member of parliament, Mahmoud Othman. "The US talks about 150,000 Iraqis in the security forces but I doubt if there are more than 40,000."
Yet none of this, and not even the news that Iraq is to sign a deal with Iran to have their old enemy provide training and even equipment for the new Iraqi military, actually matters to the politicians of the US and the UK. (But, how the Pentagon's arms-company handlers must be fuming at that last one - and Chinese ones laughing).
You see, I did say credible escape route and as the current administrations on both sides of the pond know all too well, credible does not mean real.
I predict that before too long - just about when the Iraqi elections in January 2006 are meant to be held - the Coalition will announce that Iraqi security forces can now cope alone and that the Iraqi democratic process ensures a stable and effective government. They will then get their troops the hell out of Dodge as fast as possible.
Even if the democratic process breaks down, the Iraqi security forces are shown to be a paper tiger, the country fractions into Shia and Sunni warlords and militias terrorising the generally innocent majority - even then, the official line will be "we fixed it, if it's broke again it's not our fault now".
Oh, and any mention of "civil war" will be just media or opposition bias. After all, we all know a civil war has two sides and what is shaping up in Iraq will have at least three and as many as a couple of dozen.
The rightwing media are already paving the way. Look at this tellling end to today's Telegraph leader:
No one would deny that the Iraqi politicians, ethnically divided and traumatised by decades of violence, face a formidable task in creating the political framework for peace.
Yet the longer they procrastinate, the more the terrorists will take heart and Iraq's allies wonder whether their costly commitment is worth the candle. One can only hope that, beyond the haggling, they realise the awesome responsibility they bear.
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