Four months after US officials began administering Iraq, many Iraqis are still waiting to see what role they will have in determining the country's new political system.

The workings of both the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the Iraqi Governing Council it appointed in mid-July take place behind high walls and rolls of concertina wire, creating a sense of distance that leaves many citizens feeling disenfranchised from the creation of a political framework for the new Iraq.

Sergio Vieira de Mello detected this distance. In an interview a week before being killed by a truck bomb Aug. 19, the UN's top representative in Iraq - a close observer and strong supporter of the US and British effort to establish a democracy here - said: "Let's make sure they [Governing Council members] come out of their ivory tower and communicate with the Iraqi people."

But the common complaint of many Iraqis - that the US is not fulfilling its vow to create a democracy - is based on more than their sense of being removed from power.

"The Americans said they came ... to liberate Iraq from the former regime and promised to help us stand up again and reconstruct the country," says Salah al-Ezzi, a doctor who presides over one of Iraq's many tribes from a verdant, palm-fringed yard in a village an hour outside of central Baghdad. Four months later, he continues, Iraqis instead face arrests and checkpoints. "They don't pay any respect to the people," he says of the Americans.

Dr. Ezzi's views may be partly the product of impatience. It has been a year and eight months since the US toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and general elections there are still 10 months away. It took US occupation authorities in post-World War II Japan more than a year and a half to hold elections. Postwar Germany was occupied by the allies in June 1945, with the first zone elections in 1946, and the first West German parliamentary vote held only in August 1949.

Such precedents may not ease the frustration many Iraqis feel that elections are not yet in sight and that the political milestones of the current transitional phase - such as the creation of the Governing Council and of a mechanism to write a new constitution - are being passed without their direct input.

The CPA appointed the 25 Governing Council members, rather than establishing a way for them to be popularly selected. In all likelihood, according to top Iraqi and US officials, Iraq's new constitution will be written by a group chosen through a consultative process, rather than an electoral one.

A banner hanging off a balcony in Baghdad's main market captures the discomfort of many Iraqis over the lack of an elected constitutional assembly. Appointing a charter-writing council, the banner says, in Arabic and overcapitalized English, "Is An Insult To The Iraqi Efficiency To Elect Those Who Represent Them."

Talk of ratifying a charter through a popular referendum isn't doing much to ease worries that Iraq's politics are being redrawn without popular input. Since late June, the country's most prominent Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani, has insisted that those charged with writing a constitution be chosen through direct elections. Unlike some Shiite leaders in Iraq, where some 60 percent of the population subscribes to the Shiite sect of Islam, Ayatollah al-Sistani is considered a moderate who favors the separation of state and mosque.

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