[continued from previous message] 
  
 Shi'ite heartland of the south, closing alcohol shops, curtailing music 
 and encouraging women to wear head scarves. 
  
 Vincent's murder has been linked to this new fundamentalism. 
  
 The Shi'ites can argue that all they are doing is following the example of 
 the Kurds, who are demanding federalism to maintain control over the three 
 northern provinces. The Kurds also want to expand their self-ruled region 
 to include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, from which thousands of Kurds were 
 expelled by Saddam. This prospect of a Kurdish north, a Shia south, and a 
 Sunni interior is frightening, say experts - as it would deprive Sunnis of 
 almost all of Iraq's oil reserves, situated in the south and north. 
  
 Michael O'Hanlon, an Iraq expert at the Brookings Institution in 
 Washington, says: "If Kurds continue to try to push Sunni Arabs off this 
 land and claim the oil below it for themselves, they risk creating a 
 precedent that could lead to a Sunni Arab ghetto within Iraq, deprived of 
 oil or much fertile farmland. It would be a long-term source of 
 instability. Whoever gets the land, the oil revenue should be shared." 
  
 The prospect of regional autonomy dismays the Sunnis, who fear being 
 marginalised in the centre of Iraq. The consequences of that 
 marginalisation are already being borne out. While they make up just 20% 
 of the population they provide 90% of the insurgency's active fighters and 
 most of its new recruits. 
  
 The fear is that if the Sunnis are further oppressed, their strongholds 
 will become what Afghanistan was in the 1990s - a safe haven for 
 jihadists, who will intensify their attacks on the Shi'ite-dominated 
 security forces and mobilise against Kirkuk or other oil-rich sectors of 
 the country. 
  
 Meanwhile, fears of a Shia 'theocracy' are also being expressed by women's 
 rights campaigners. Women's groups had been invited to take part in 
 drafting the constitution to try to stop religious Shi'ites proposing laws 
 to extend the power of clerics over matters of family law. 
  
 "We're against federalism because we are against sharia. That is our 
 fear," said Ghareba Ghareb of the Iraqi Women's Association. 
  
 They also want women to run at least 10 of Iraq's 30-odd government 
 ministries, and the number of places reserved for women on party lists 
 raised to 40% in future elections. Most of all, they want a promise of 
 respect for women's rights. 
  
 But the Shi'ite leadership is relying on women to carry much of the fight 
 over the role of Islam. The conservative cause is being led by women, who 
 are members of the dominant Shi'ite alliance under the auspices of Grand 
 Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric, who see the 
 new constitution as an opportunity to bring Iraq's laws into harmony with 
 Islam's version of divine law. 
  
 A compromise is now being drawn out. The negotiators agreed that Islam 
 "would be a source of legislation" in the new nation, but that laws 
 derived from other religions - as well as secular legislation - would 
 carry weight, too. 
  
 But the deal could also have serious repercussions for Iraqi women. Among 
 aspects of Islamic law that could be incorporated are provisions that 
 would allow men as many as four wives and reduce the amount of money 
 allotted to women in inheritances. 
  
 Even ardent supporters of the war in Britain and the US now concede that 
 this prospect of a faction-ridden, semi-theocracy was not what hundreds of 
 coalition troops died to create. And the strain in the US is now beginning 
 to tell. 
  
 As Bush drove away from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Friday afternoon, 
 he passed a protest of grieving, angry mothers who are demanding that the 
 President meet them to explain his Iraq policies. The women are fast 
 becoming the focal point of a nation's concerns and fears over a war that 
 has dragged on longer, and cost more lives, than most Americans ever 
 imagined would be possible. 
  
 In Washington, the question of whether the battle for Iraq has been lost 
 is no longer confined to irredentist anti-war Democrats. According to 
 Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official now working at the hawkish 
 American Enterprise Institute: "The insurgency has gained momentum as a 
 result of failed US policy and well-meaning but wrong-headed assumptions." 
  
 Rubin, who has spent more time outside Baghdad's "Green Zone" than the 
 majority of US officials, worries that American policy in Iraq is "fatally 
 flawed" and that the coalition's continuing presence, both military and 
 civilian, may at best be a one step forwards, one step backwards problem, 
 condemning Iraq to boundless insecurity. The disturbing question is, to 
 which no one has a good answer, is the American presence in Iraq helping 
 or hurting? Rubin says: "The progress evident in Baghdad - new stores, 
 private banks, Internet cafes - is largely despite us rather than because 
 of us." 
  
 Just 38% of the American public believes the President is doing a good job 
 in Iraq and a new poll this week found that 56% of the electorate wanted 
 some or all US troops to be brought home now. Support for the war is 
 slipping away at home as the insurgency continues to rage, claiming more 
 American lives, and US commanders appear unable to counter it effectively. 
  
 In Britain, the Foreign Office is resigned to the tightening grip of 
 religious parties over Iraq's new civic apparatus - and the acceptance 
 that ideas about equality and women's rights may be sacrificed in the bid 
 for stability. William Patey, the UK's ambassador to Iraq, admits the 
 world may well have to accept a theocratic state. "Having a democratic 
 election in which you have theocracy is okay, as long as that can be 
 changed and is not a once-and-for-all election," he said. 
  
 The war to topple Saddam was won long ago. But the dread question being 
 asked across London and Washington now is: will what replaces him be any 
 better? 
  
  
  
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