The Shiite Position.

The political impasse which has caused such a long delay in forming a cabinet is being viewed by the four senior-most Shiite religious men of Najaf - the Marja'iya - as a symbolic defeat for their aspirations of seeing a Shiite-dominated administration take control in Iraq. Partial blame for the delay is being placed on the US. The focus of that blame is the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), which the US co-wrote with the Iraqis. The TAL sets the rules for governing the elections, for installing the new government, for drafting the permanent and - most important of all - for vetoing any part of the draft which is not acceptable to a two-thirds majority of three provinces, which means either the Kurds or the Sunni Arabs can block the constitutional proces.

The Shiite Arab politicians have been especially critical of the TAL-stipulated measure which requires a two-thirds vote by the National Assembly to appoint the president. They have point out that the TAL failed to set a deadline for the appointment. The US side, in its defence, said the two-thirds requirement was meant to prevent any single group from dominating the new government. Regarding the avoidance of using the tool of deadlines, the Americans said it was largely a measure to avoid "micro-managing" the process.

At the heart of the defunct US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which played a crucial role in writing the TAL, is the notion of making a political compromise for which US politics is criticised. The standard pejorative phrase to describe the cumbersome process of compromise is often referred to as the "making of sausage" - dirty, nasty and unwieldy. For the Iraqis - who do not have much background, appetite or the required patience for compromise - the impasse has been frustrating.

For the Shiite Marja'iya, this process has proved to be threatening the very emergence of a Shiite-dominated government. The fact that the Iraqis did has the appetite for compromise was also surprising to the Americans. There has been little "commingling" between the various groups, as is done among Western parliamentarians. The UIA, which has a slight majority, has grumbled that the two-thirds requirement was keeping it from taking control. As one of its members said, the UIA did not need any coalitions, because "legally speaking, we have enough votes, more than 50% of the assembly seats". The UIA has 146 of the 275 seats available in the National Assembly. The next-biggest bloc, the Kurdistan Alliance, has 77 seats.

The Sunni groups have not participated in the elections, but are being wooed by the Shiites. Yawer, a Sunni and president under the interim government, refused the speakership, implying that he was too important to be speaker of the new parliament, and preferred a vice presidency. Hassani, regarded as a "Turkoman outsider" by most Sunni Arabs, is also an Islamist, albeit a moderate one. Thus, the secular Shiites view him with suspicion. Besides, no one knows how well he will get along with the Shiite Islamists, especially the hardliners. The impasse in the making of a Shiite-dominated government has already affected the prestige of the Grand Ayatollah Sistani. The Muqtada Al-Sadr faction in the Shiite leadership is beginning to taunt the ayatollah's now famous penchant for the "rule of the majority", while the UIA continues to wait to take charge of the new government. The Muqtada faction is critical of Sistani's insistence for including Sunnis in the government.

And while the Marja'iya is wary, the Sunni insurgents remain oblivious to these developments. They know that the emergence of a Shiite-dominated government will be just another step towards their defeat. Thus, they continue their attacks on the Shiites, Iraqi security forces and the Americans. They also know that, since the elections, the tide of chaos which they were hoping to create has not materialised.

Sunni Insurgency Losing: Britain's top military officer in Iraq Lt Gen Sir John Kiszely on April 4 said the Sunni insurgency was flagging, thanks to political and military defeats since he arrived in October. Guerilla attacks had fallen to 300 a week from 500. Guerrillas, he said, had failed in four major objectives: to retain their safe haven in Falluja; to deter Iraqis from voting in the Jan. 30 elections; to disrupt the creation of Iraq's own security forces; and to demonstrate that Iraq was ungovernable.

As a result, many guerrilla sympathisers had concluded that the government had the upper hand. He said: "For those sitting on the fence, in October it was not at all clear who was going to be winning, whether in the long term it was going to be the government and Iraqi security forces ruling this country or the insurgents". Now, "ordinary people who might have supported the insurgency or been ambivalent...increasingly see the purposeless of it". He admitted the insurgency was still "deadly", however, and spoke two days after an estimated 40 to 60 Salafi guerrillas of the local Al-Qaeda leader Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi massed to launch an assault on the US-controlled Abu Ghraib prison, wounding 44 US soldiers and 13 inmates. US officials said the attackers suffered 50 casualties before withdrawing. However, reports of such large set-piece battles had become scarcer than in the autumn, when insurgents regularly assembled forces capable of over-running police stations. US fatalities had fallen off, with the US military admitting 33 deaths in March, the lowest number in over a year. While some guerillas, such as those of Zarqawi, would probably keep up their fight, others including members of the Saddam regime were exploring a dialogue with the Iraqi government, he said.