President George Bush has pronounced the election in Iraq a success. "The world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East," he said yesterday.

Since this is more or less what he was bound to say anyway, the only surprise is that he waited until four hours after the polls had closed before saying it.

It's a curious sort of freedom where candidates cannot campaign openly for fear of their lives and where, despite the tightest security that the occupation armies and the Iraqi forces can provide - curfews, banning cars from the streets, intensive searches at polling stations, etc - more than 40 people still die.

Violence on that scale is by no means unusual at election time in other parts of the world. Four years ago, for instance, municipal elections in Yemen, where there was no insurgency, left 29 people dead.

The problem in Iraq, though, is that such violence is not a one-off. It is a regular, almost daily, occurrence and nobody realistically expects it to subside any time soon.

It's almost two years since Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, shrugged off the looting during the first few days after the fall of Saddam Hussein by accusing the media of exaggerating.

"Freedom's untidy," he said. "Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things.

"I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it," he continued. "I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest ... I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot - one thing after another. It's just unbelievable ..."

In those days, bringing stability to Iraq was just a matter of rounding up the Ba'athist "remnants" and catching the man who was orchestrating the trouble from his hole in the ground.

Eventually they caught Saddam, but it got worse.

Continuing violence was then attributed to the "run-up" to the handover of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government.

Sovereignty was duly handed over, George Bush famously scribbled "Let freedom reign" on his notepad, and again it got worse.

Since then, we have had violence in the "run-up" to the election. This time, American officials have been less optimistic. Applying a sort of inverse magic - the way actors superstitiously wish each other good luck before a performance by saying "break a leg" - they have been predicting that things may get worse still after the election. And this time their predictions are likely to be right.

None of this is to disparage the efforts of millions of Iraqis who turned out to vote yesterday in defiance of threats from the insurgents, but portrayals of the election as "historic" are way off mark: all the old problems remain.

The election has done nothing to help resolve the question of Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions - particularly that of the disaffected Sunni Arab minority. If anything, it has further institutionalized these divisions.

Whatever the results when the votes are finally counted, it is already clear that the emerging system of political parties is based around interest groups and men of influence rather than debates about policy - a system that may look vaguely democratic on the outside but is actually a barrier to genuine democracy.

Much of this is the fault of the Bush administration which, for its own reasons, has turned the ballot box into a symbol of freedom around the world without paying much attention to the slow and laborious business of creating the civil institutions that make elections meaningful.

Over the next few months, the new Iraqi parliament is supposed to draft a permanent constitution which, among other things, will have to grapple with the thorny issues of federalism and the role of Islam in the state - issues that the Americans ducked before handing over sovereignty.

Arguments about the constitution could bring Iraq to the crunch point - possibly with fatal consequences - or, more likely, the parliament will come up with another fudge, putting off the crunch (as the Americans did) for another day.

If the Iraqis are lucky, they may eventually arrive at the corrupt fig-leaf sort of democracy that flourishes in other Arab states such as Egypt. The sort of democracy where elections change nothing and their results are always a foregone conclusion. On the other hand, they may not be so fortunate.

The liberation of Iraq is still a long way off.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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