Will the insurgency continue to grow alongside the nascent political process that will lead to a referendum on a new constitution? Or will these elections be the high-water mark of the violence? 

It is the latter that Washington and London are counting on.

The social complexity of the insurgency has led some to abandon attempts to put a numerical value on the scale of the resistance, which at least one Iraqi minister has claimed recently to be 200,000 strong, to evaluate whether even now it is still growing, and to conceive of it in terms of its potential to influence instead.

"It is very difficult to define what membership of the insurgency entails," says one Whitehall source. "If you let your cousin hide in your house because he is an insurgent, does that mean you are an insurgent too?

"The crucial question is whether its influence is continuing to expand. At the moment the insurgency still lacks any coherent political agenda. We still see it as operating largely in local networks and it has yet to show any signs of achieving any consensus across the sectarian divide."

This inability to join forces with Shias in a joint resistance, says the official, is despite the fact that all parties, Shias included, say they want foreign troops to leave.

But if officials hope that this may mark the limit of the uprising, what is also evident is that despite the siege of Fallujah and continuing operations across the Sunni triangle and elsewhere, the resistance -- in physical terms at least -- still appears not to have lost its momentum.

While it is inevitable that the violence will accelerate in the days ahead, the insurgents, foreign governments and Iraqis themselves recognize that it is the political settlement reached after the elections that is crucial to whether Iraq can avoid a wider bloodshed.

A Shia-dominated national assembly of 275 members will be asked to select a president and two vice-presidents who will then choose a prime minister and nominate a cabinet. That cabinet will be referred back to the assembly for approval.

Already some are predicting that the allocation of ministerial portfolios may be a source of its own tension as individuals and parties struggle for powerful ministries.

Mike Rubin, a former political adviser to the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, is one of those who sees the potential for tension over who controls the powerful interior ministry, and beyond that a clash of authority with American military authorities.

It is a fight, Rubin believes, that the Shia will win, with the Kurds getting the presidency and the Sunnis, perhaps, the foreign ministry.

Even more critical, however, will be the struggle to write Iraq's new constitution, scheduled to be put to a referendum in October, a referendum that can be blocked if it is rejected by three provinces, a point in Iraq's interim law already deeply unpopular with Shias, who fear Kurds and Sunnis could use it to block articles that enjoy majority support, in particular over the sensitive area of the role of religion in the state.

It is precisely for these reasons that both US and UK officials are convinced that even if there is a widespread Sunni boycott, some 'mechanism' must be incorporated by a Shia-dominated Iraqi assembly and government to ensure proper Sunni representation of some kind.

Among those who have articulated this in recent days has been John Negroponte, the US ambassador in Baghdad, who said last week that it was important for Iraq's new political leaders to be "as inclusive as possible" in government even if the Sunnis under-perform in the vote. It is a call that was reiterated on Friday by the present justice minister, Malek Dohan al-Hasan, a Shia who warned his co-religionists to protect minority rights. He touched on an already controversial issue that many fear will be exacerbated if a Shia landslide is returned in the absence of Sunni voters: that Shia parties must refrain from staffing the government only with their followers, a trend already apparent in the interim government. "Elections are now certain," said Hasan, who heads a secular list contesting the election.

"But I ask the Shias to look around them. You are in an Arab Sunni region. Who will come to your aid if you monopolize power? Look at the example of Saddam and what happens when political power is not used for the common good."

"The Sunni groups -- and I truly despise using this term because Iraq is truly a mixed nation -- have not been frank either. Their argument about the illegitimacy of elections under occupation does not hold," he added.

It is an issue that is also bothering some western officials who admit that no matter how successful election-day turns out to be in terms of numbers voting, a great deal is being asked of Iraqis about how they exercise their sovereignty.

"The parallel is with the Russian economy," said one British official. "We are asking an awful lot of the Iraqi people, who have no experience of a fully participatory democratic system, and who do not enjoy even the minimum levels of political trust.

(China Daily January 26, 2005)