Constitutional delay and context

The Iraqi constitution has been delayed for at least another week, but the real question is if more time is going to do any good.

The main sticking points -- "revolving around Islam, oil and the distribution of political power" as the NY Times puts it -- are issues that are going to plague Iraq for years, no matter what gets codified in the document.

Still, much of this constitutional debate means little to ordinary Iraqis at the moment. Here's some perspective from Robert Fisk:

Everyone knows the real issue behind the constitution: will it allow Iraq’s three principle communities - the Shias, the Sunnis and the Kurds - to form their own federal states? And if so, will this mean the break up of Iraq? The Sunnis, the only one of the three whose homes do not sit on oil reserves, are naturally against such a division which would, incidentally, allow the Americans and the other Western nations, who still claim to have liberated Iraq for "democracy", to reach oil deals with two weakened entities rather than a potentially united Iraqi nation.

Add to all this Kurdistan’s demand that the future demography of Kirkuk - the Arab population injected by Saddam, the Kurdish population of the city exiled by Saddam and its minority Turkomans - be settled before the constitution is written, and you get a good idea why even the Americans are beginning to lose patience. The Kurds want oil-rich Kirkuk to be the capital of Kurdistan - a state which already exists although no Iraqi seems to be prepared to admit this - and thus further cut away at the frontier between " Arab" Iraq and "Kurdish" Iraq.

The problem is that all these issues are played out not in Iraq but in the Alice-in-Wonderland world already described. This is a unique place in which Saddam’s trial is always being predicted to start in two months’ time - on at least four occasions this has happened - in which Iraqi reconstruction is always about to restart and in which insurgent strength is always weakening. In fact, Iraqi guerrillas are now striking at the Americans 70 times a day and so fearful are senior American officers of an increase in attacks that this has become their principle reason for trying to prevent the release of 87 further photographs and videotapes of the Abu Ghraib prison torture and abuses.

In Real Iraq, it makes no difference. For the "street", Saddam is history, there is no reconstruction and the filth of Abu Ghraib causes no great surprise - because most Iraqis knew all about it months before the West opened its horrified eyes to the pictures.

As for the constitution, I asked an old Iraqi friend what he thought yesterday. "Sure, it’s important," he said. "But my family lives in fear of kidnapping, I’m too afraid to tell my father I work for journalists, and we only have one hour in six of electricity and we can’t even keep our food from going bad in the fridge. Federalism? You can’t eat federalism and you can’t use it to fuel your car and it doesn’t make my fridge work."