Patrick Cockburn on the power politics going on in Iraq.

At the height of the shortage of petrol in Baghdad a month ago people queued in their cars for as long as 18 hours outside petrol stations. One reason for the lack of petrol was that much of it was being stolen by black marketeers.

One day Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the 73-year-old clerical leader of the Iraqi Shiah who has not left his modest house in the holy city of Najaf for a year, sent out an instruction that Shiites should not be involved in the petrol black market.
"It shows the enormous influence of Sistani that you could see his edict having an immediate effect on the black market in petrol," a Shiiite friend told me, though he added ruefully that Sistani's success showed that most of the black market must be controlled by Shiites.

In the last two weeks the Shiites, some 60 per cent of the Iraqi population, have started to express their frustrations on the street. Tens of thousands of people have marched through the centre of Basra and Baghdad to demand fair elections to select a new Iraqi assembly and government. A yellow flag with a Shiite slogan on it now hangs from the top of the monument which replaced the statue of Saddam Hussein famously toppled in Baghdad last year.

It is a critical moment for the US and British venture in Iraq and perhaps their last chance to conclude it without a political disaster.

Short version:

If we insist on the caucus model for elections, and Sistani disses it, we're screwed.
If we insist on the caucus model for elections, and Sistani doesn't dis it, but it doesn't seem legitimate to Iraqis, we're screwed.
If we try to implement direct elections, as Sistani seems to want, we might screw it up, and we'll be screwed.
If we try to implement direct elections, and we somehow manage to succeed, we won't be able to control the outcome like we were planning to with the caucuses, and we might be screwed.