FOOTNOTES.(The Talk of the Town)

The new Iraqi government that was sworn in last week, after the first democratic elections in the country's history, took three months to create. It is due to expire, according to a timetable set by the United Nations, by December (after the writing of a constitution, a referendum, and another election), which means that almost a third of its life has been spent being born. During this prolonged delivery, the Iraqis, who risked so much by going to vote on January 30th, and gained so much by showing themselves that they could, have steadily lost faith in the leaders they elected. While the politicians have been arguing over jobs--some key positions are still unfilled--the post-election lull in violence has come to an end, and the daily deaths of scores of Iraqis have again become numbingly familiar.

One conclusion to draw from the unlovely spectacle of democratic governance in Iraq is that the two dominant American views of the war were both wrong. Iraq is a far less modern, less united, and less friendly place than the fondest hopes of the war's architects would have had the American public believe. At the same time, the ability of those architects to control the outcome for their own purposes is close to zero. Some war boosters, in and out of the Administration, have nonetheless been quietly declaring mission accomplished redux, with a shrug: they never thought Iraq would be perfect, and everything from here on out is just footnotes. In public, they seem to want Americans to forget all about Iraq.

The group of men who have emerged as Iraq's rulers is dominated by aging former opposition politicians--heavyset power brokers with thick jowls and armed militias. Their backing comes from narrow ethnic and sectarian bases; since the elections, though, the sound of Shiite triumphalism has been growing louder. Shiite leaders have begun to insist on a wholesale purge of the overwhelmingly Sunni Baathists recently brought back into government. The new Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, of the Shiite Islamic Dawa Party, is a man of mediocre talents but with an oratorical gift admired by Iraqis. During his time on the now defunct Governing Council, he used to harass secretaries for coming to work unveiled. According to one leading Shiite cleric, Jaafari was Tehran's choice.The Deputy Prime Minister is the Lazarus-like Ahmad Chalabi, who has converted his poll-tested unpopularity into power through sheer backroom political genius. Washington neoconservatives once claimed that Chalabi was the only real liberal among Iraqi leaders, but he owes his comeback from last year's disgrace to a tactical alliance with the least liberal man in Iraqi politics: the radical (and unstable) cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Chalabi, a secularist without facial hair, now occupies the seat of hard-line Shiism at the table. A consummate dealmaker, he is holding the oil portfolio until the government selects a minister. That person will come, in all likelihood, from the small party that calls itself the true heir of Sadr's martyred father, who advocated the rule of the clerics. Moqtada's own followers have been given the health ministry; having intimidated doctors by sending armed militiamen to take over hospitals, they will now be able to practice their theocratic ...