Little chance country's nightmare will end soon

Once again, in the results of these elections, the Americans and British have been luckier than they deserved. The main victors, the religious Shia alliance supported by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, have fallen short of the tally at which they might be able to run Iraq more or less alone. They will probably have a small majority of the seats in the 275-member assembly. But they are further away than they hoped from the two-thirds majority they needed to write the country's new constitution on their own.

The Shias' failure to achieve a clean sweep means there will have to be give and take on all sides. The prospect of inter-ethnic strife has receded. In the two weeks between the polling and the results, at least one senior Shia Alliance leader talked of making Islam the "sole" source of law in Iraq - horrifying to the Kurds and a sure recipe for sectarian conflict. That is probably off the agenda now. The new constitution may stick with the compromise agreed in the interim document - that religion should be merely one of the sources of law.

The interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, on the other hand, may lose his job: probably another good thing, proving to Iraqis it is they rather than the Americans who pick their leaders. Despite a slick, well-funded campaign, Mr Allawi's party got less than 14 per cent of the vote. His attempts to present himself as tough on security were

undermined by his failure to make any impact on the problem in his seven months in office.

Mr Allawi should not be written off. The other parties are all coalitions; he will control the largest single group of probably about 40 assembly members. But he may have to make do with a demotion. If he remains in his job, that will offend the Shia religious victors, who are entitled to claim the prime ministership for themselves.

The Kurds, who turned out in massive numbers, will prove vital powerbrokers. They will demand a big share of autonomy in return. They also want to control the oil city of Kirkuk, deeply divided between Kurd and Arab. If there is to be any inter-ethnic explosion in Iraq, Kirkuk is the most likely spot.

The balance of the results may make civil war outside Kirkuk less likely. But it also means that any government may be weak and divided, less able to tackle the horrendous problems that it faces. Number one of those is, of course, the insurgency - which, after a post-election lull, is back to its full savage intensity. Sunnis, it seems, voted in only minute numbers, making the task of bringing them into peaceful politics harder.

Important as the elections were, nobody should confuse them with the arrival of an effective government. It may end up running little more than the assembly building. Across a good part of the country, the new ministers will not be able to show their faces for fear of death. Much of Iraq is effectively run by local gangsters, tribal chiefs or insurgents, or a mixture of all three. Basic services such as electricity have never been worse and the economy of Arab Iraq is in ruins.

There is little prospect that any elected government, even one more united and experienced than this one is likely to be, can change any of that in a hurry.