Iraqi government starts to take shape

Creating democracy in Iraq has been a long, hard slog. But after two months of wrangling, the country's key political factions turned a corner this week. They finally agreed on the top government posts, including a Sunni parliamentary speaker, Shiite and Sunni vice presidents, and a Kurdish president.

With the logjam between the two major political blocs - Shiites and Kurds - broken, the pace of appointments is quickening. As soon as Thursday, a Shiite prime minister and top cabinet ministers could be named.

The protracted deadlock had begun to infuriate the Iraqi public and showed signs of buoying a tenacious insurgency. Among US officials, concern over the delay had been muted by the argument that Iraq's new leaders needed time to settle into a completely reversed power pyramid - before taking on the awaiting challenges.

But the tough bargaining over top government posts has left such thorns as regional sharing of oil revenues and Islam's role in the government largely to later debate. And concerns have grown over the time it has taken to put a functioning, post-elections government in place.

The accord is a sign that Iraqis are learning to compromise - a concept that was underdeveloped, to say the least, in the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein. But analysts say that it's only the first leg of a long road ahead that includes writing a new constitution.

"Yes, this is a good step, but it's just the beginning," says Phebe Marr, an Iraq specialist at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.

Both the Iraqi people and outsiders including the US might have preferred that the process of forming a government move faster, but "Iraq is going through revolutionary change here," Ms. Marr adds, "and we should expect that there will be big problems, that things won't fall into place on some kind of ideal timeline."

The most promising sign, she says, is that Iraqis ethnic and religious communities are learning to compromise. Less encouraging, Marr says, is how the debate has resulted in pushing off what she calls Iraq's "existential issues" to later resolution.

Wednesday the national assembly named Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, as president. The vice-presidents will be Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite Arab political leader, and Ghazi al-Yawer, a Sunni sheik who is also president of the interim government. All three are well-known figures in Iraq. The presidency council is expected to name Ibrahim al-Jaafari, leader of a Shiite political party, to the powerful prime minister post Thursday.

One area of concern is the impact the long weeks of behind-doors negotiations for a leadership has had on the public. "It's taken some of the enthusiasm out," says Henri Barkey, a former State Department Iraq analyst. A government that got out of the blocks quickly and was seen addressing the insurgency and the country's glaring lack of services could have built on the optimism people were feeling for Iraq's new democracy after the Jan. 30 elections, he says.

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