The pictures of American soldiers abusing and torturing prisoners created a global backlash against the U.S. presence in Iraq, outraging allies and opponents alike.

Several low-ranking soldiers have been prosecuted. They blamed senior officers, saying they were just following orders, but the new probe has now cleared those officers.

The investigation was intended as the military’s conclusion on the ultimate responsibility for the scandal. It is the only U.S. inquiry so far to have had the power to apportion blame. Critics say it has made scapegoats of ordinary soldiers. “This decision unfortunately continues a pattern of exoneration and indeed promotion for many of the individuals at the heart of the torture scandal,” said Amnesty International spokesman Alistair Hodgett.

Army officials say 125 soldiers have been tried at courts-martial or been otherwise punished. The officials have always denied that the abuse was systemic or planned by the senior military hierarchy. Yet some soldiers and Karpinski have said their superiors encouraged the abusive practices and relaxed rules about harsh treatment of prisoners.

Guy Womack, a lawyer for Spec. Charles Graner, who has been sentenced to 10 years for abusing prisoners, called for action to be taken against at least two of the senior officers.

Other official investigations have taken a stronger line. One probe by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger concluded that Sanchez should have taken firmer action in November 2003, when the Army first realized the scale of the abuse. An investigation last summer found that the “action and inaction” of Sanchez and his senior officers “indirectly contributed” to what was going on at Abu Ghraib.

The report followed a week of renewed bloodshed — including the massacre of 19 men in a football stadium in Haditha and the shooting down of a civilian helicopter — that appears to have been encouraged by three months of political stalemate since January’s elections. Saturday, the U.S. military arrested six Iraqi men in connection with the downing of the helicopter.

The report also follows increasing disillusionment among foreign diplomats and Iraqi party leaders over the choice two weeks ago by the Shiite majority of Ibrahim al-Jaafari for prime minister. Iraqi and Western officials have told the Observer that they fear Jaafari lacks the leadership skills to guide Iraq at such a crucial time.

According to a report in Saturday’s New York Times, the political impasse is largely the result of leading Kurdish political figures trying to stall the formation of a new government in an effort to force out Jaafari. “The Kurds are intent on delaying the government so that Jaafari will fall,” Sami al-Askari, a member of the Shiite alliance, told the paper.

Last week British and U.S. officials blamed the increase in violence on the continuing inability of Iraq’s political parties to agree on a government — a hiatus that bodes ill for negotiations on a new constitution due later this year.

A spokesman for the Kurdish alliance denied on Friday that there was any effort to unseat Jaafari. However, Kurdish leaders have never been comfortable with religious figures such as Jaafari, the leader of a popular Shiite religious party. Under Iraq’s transitional law, Jaafari will lose his position if he does not name a cabinet by May 7. If he is displaced, Iraq’s new president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and his deputies would choose a prime minister.

With 35 percent of all polling stations in Iraq reporting results, the coalition of Shiite parties was maintaining a lead of two-thirds of 3.3 million votes counted so far, with the electoral list of religious parties dominating.

As the counting continued Saturday, so did the violence. Four Iraqi soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Basra.

While Kurdish and Sunni votes have yet to be counted, it is certain the days of the Shiites’ tahmeech are over. And it is not simply in its physical terms that the south has been long separated from the heart of government. In educational, political and social terms, the gulf is enormous. A tiny proportion of people in the south can be described as muthaqaf, or cultured and educated, compared with those in the north.

In the south, 60 percent have not progressed beyond primary education, a difference compounded by the religiosity of the largely Shiite south. How that religiosity will fit into Iraq’s new government and constitution, how it will connect with secular Kurds and Sunnis, has become a pressing issue. Central is the role of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who encouraged the formation of List 169, the “Candle” coalition of largely Shiite religious parties. It was Sistani too who ordered Shiites to vote. And it was he who was influential in the decision of Shiite politicians last year to walk out at the end of negotiations on the interim constitution. The question now is what role he will play in Iraq’s new politics.

Sayeed Ali al-Safi al-Hakim is Sistani’s representative in Basra. He says he speaks only for himself, but it is clear that he reflects the feelings of the clerical leadership, the marjiya, about religion and politics. He says that Islam should be a framework for governance and that where secular politics risks leaving that path, the clerical authority would intervene. “The marjiya called people to vote because it provides the shade for all Iraqis to enjoy,” he said.

Although he denies the Candle list was actively endorsed by Sistani and the marjiya in Najaf, many Shiite preachers at the Friday prayers before the elections gave voters that impression, with at least one going so far as to suggest: “Allah would ask how they voted if they died.”

Hakim prefers to outline a more complex relationship between a future government with strong representation of the religious parties and the religious authority in Najaf. “The marjiya always leaves people to decide for themselves,” he tells me. “But if it believes [a future government] is against the interest of the people, then it will speak.” It is clear the marjiya will watch carefully the attempt to draw up a new constitution. “It is for the committee to solve the problems of a new constitution,” says Hakim, “but it should not oppose this country’s Islamic identity.”

This position, says Simon Collis, Britain’s consul in Basra, is designed to keep separate the religious and political authorities in Najaf and Baghdad. “Sistani and those around him think strategically. They want a unified Iraq, so they want guarantees that lock in all Iraqis’ rights. That means something Sunnis and Kurds can buy into.

“And if you are looking at what Sistani could have done in terms of interventions, it is clear that he tends toward the quietist school of Shia Islam [that seeks to separate the political and the religious]. If he wanted to be noisier about the vote, he could have. But he used his interventions sparingly.”

While the authority of Sistani and the marjiya is expected to have a significant impact on the way mainstream religious parties, such as SCIRI and Dawa, negotiate in the coming year as the new constitution is drawn up, others are looking to their own authority and clerical leadership — not least the followers of Sadr, who led a violent uprising last summer against coalition troops in the south. While he encouraged some followers to boycott elections held under “the occupation,” he allowed others to stand for election as independents.

Among these is Salam Maliky, 32, Basra’s deputy governor, an English graduate involved in the 1999 uprising before being forced to flee Saddam’s secret police. Maliky’s relationship with Sadr is different from the relationship between the larger parties and Sistani. “We are a religious-political entity, not a party. We are interested in getting religion involved in Iraq’s political process,” he says.

But while he insists Sadr had no role in the elections, it is clear that he consulted him closely, and Maliky says he will not do anything Sadr would not wish. “If the new government is to be successful, its basis should be Islam. But I want to stress that none of the religious parties wants to establish an Islamic government in Iraq.”

Balwa reflects the sharp divisions in Iraq in the run-up to an election for which 12.5 million people are registered to vote. He reflects on an Iraq divided between those who will vote and those, either through fear or rejection of the process, will stay at home.

He reflects, too, on an Iraq divided between the minority Sunni Muslims, who dominated the Iraq of Saddam Hussein for decades, and southern Shiites and northern Kurds. The latter comprise the 80 percent of the population who were persecuted under Saddam’s rule, while the Sunni minority of just 20 percent dominated all areas of Iraqi life, the ruling Baath Party in particular.

It is the lethal tension between these two groups that will define whether the next 12 months of the political process, which the elections will kick-start, will mark the beginning of the end of Iraq’s violence or the start of the country’s breakup and descent into civil war. The elections will not just be critical for Iraqis. For countries such as Britain and the U.S., whose increasingly war-weary populations are supplying the bulk of foreign troops in Iraq, the elections threaten to have a lasting impact, dictating when those soldiers can finally come home.

Evidence on which path Iraq might follow has for months been pored over by politicians, diplomats, academics and intelligence officials. If one thing is certain, it is that this month’s elections will mark the moment of ascendancy of the majority Shiites, who make up 60 percent or more of the country’s population — and of Sunni defeat. What is also certain is that the weeks leading up to the announcement of the results in mid-February will be bloody.

These are twin issues that are highlighted by Mike Rubin, a former political advisor to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: I expect there to be a great deal of violence, especially in the two or three days before the election itself.

He describes the conundrum at the heart of the Sunni abstention and Sunni violence. The Sunni leaders, he explains, are not afraid that the election will not represent them. They are afraid that it will represent them. They are afraid of coming to terms with their minority status. While their minority status will be confirmed whether Sunnis vote or not, all they can hope is that by abstaining in large numbers, and blaming the violent disruption caused by their own community for being unable to participate, somehow they can rob the poll of its legitimacy.

What is clear is that despite the spiraling violence aimed at disrupting the elections, vast numbers of Iraqis will vote on Jan. 30. Polls conducted over the past few months in Iraq — while uncertain in other respects — have indicated that 80 percent of the electorate intends to vote, a figure that would suggest turnouts for Shiites and Kurds in the ninth percentile and a Sunni vote likely to be desperately low. Given the campaign of abstention and intimidation in the Sunni heartland, that makes the likely results not difficult to fathom: a massive victory for lists dominated by Shiites way beyond the 60 percent that they represent in the population. That high turnout is being encouraged by a religious decree issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani calling on all Shiites to vote.

But for some the likely scale of a victory for Shiite candidates as a result of a Sunni boycott is as much a cause for concern as the boycott itself. Among those afraid of the impact of a widespread Sunni abstention is Iraq’s interior minister, Falah al-Naqib.

Boycotting means betrayal and the sparking of civil war, he said last week. If the National Assembly does not represent all Iraqis, we will enter civil war. It is precisely this that has driven one of Iraq’s most influential Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to appeal last week to reluctant Sunnis to vote. Most Sunnis, however, seem unlikely to listen, a situation that has deteriorated markedly from even two months ago, when the main Sunni political party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, entered a list of 275 candidates.

After failing to win agreement for a six-month delay of the vote because of the violence, the party eventually withdrew. While it remains on the ballot, its candidates have promised not to take up their seats. With a self-justifying logic, Ayad al-Samarrai, a senior official in the party, said he believed a delay would at least have helped reduce the violence. If there are 80 percent of our supporters who can’t vote now, that would be down to 20 percent who couldn’t vote, he said, ignoring the fact that it is precisely the fact of Sunni militants seeking to disrupt the elections that is behind the low Sunni participation. It is a reality not likely to be transformed by a six-month delay.

But whether the election’s backers in London and Washington like it or not — and no matter how hard they try to persuade the world to focus on the political process and not the violence — it is precisely the fear of civil war and division that hangs over not just the poll but its aftermath as well. A single question dominates: whether the insurgency will continue to grow in parallel to the rolling out of the political process that will lead to a referendum on a new constitution planned for October, or whether these elections will be the high-water mark of the violence. It is the latter that Washington and London are counting on.

And the social complexity of the insurgency has led some to abandon attempts to put a numerical value on the scale of the resistance, which at least one Iraqi minister has claimed recently to be 200,000 strong, to evaluate whether even now it is still growing, and to conceive of it in terms of its potential to influence instead.

It is very difficult to define what membership of the insurgency entails, says one Whitehall source. If you let your cousin hide in your house because he is an insurgent, does that mean you are an insurgent too? The crucial question is whether its influence is continuing to expand. At the moment the insurgency still lacks any coherent political agenda. We still see it as operating largely in local networks, and it has yet to show any signs of achieving any consensus across the sectarian divide.

This inability to join forces with Shiites in a joint resistance, says the official, exists despite the fact that all parties, Shiites included, say they want foreign troops to leave. But if officials hope that this may mark the limit of the uprising, what is also evident is that despite the siege of Fallujah and continuing operations across the Sunni triangle and elsewhere, the resistance — in physical terms at least — still appears not to have lost its momentum.

While it is inevitable that the violence will accelerate in the days ahead, the insurgents, foreign governments and Iraqis themselves recognize that it is the political settlement reached after the elections that is crucial to whether Iraq can avoid a wider bloodshed.

A Shiite-dominated National Assembly of 275 members will be asked to select a president and two vice presidents, who will then choose a prime minister and nominate a cabinet. That cabinet will be referred back to the assembly for approval. Already some are predicting that the allocation of ministerial portfolios may be a source of its own tension as individuals and parties struggle for powerful ministries.

Former U.S. political advisor Rubin is one of those who see the potential for tension over who controls the powerful Interior Ministry and, beyond that, a clash of authority with American military authorities. It is a fight, Rubin believes, that the Shiites will win, with the Kurds getting the presidency and the Sunnis, perhaps, the Foreign Ministry.

Even more critical, however, will be the struggle to write Iraq’s new Constitution, scheduled to be put to a referendum in October, a referendum that can be blocked if it is rejected by three provinces, a point in Iraq’s interim law already deeply unpopular with Shiites, who fear that Kurds and Sunnis could use it to block articles that enjoy majority support, in particular over the sensitive area of the role of religion in the state.

It is precisely for these reasons that both U.S. and U.K. officials are convinced that even if there is a widespread Sunni boycott, some mechanism must be incorporated by a Shiite-dominated Iraqi assembly and government to ensure proper Sunni representation of some kind.

Among those who have articulated this in recent days is been John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, who said last week that it was important for Iraq’s new political leaders to be as inclusive as possible in government even if the Sunnis underperform in the vote. It is a call that was reiterated on Friday by the present justice minister, Malek Dohan al-Hasan, a Shiite who warned his co-religionists to protect minority rights, especially those of Sunnis staying away from the polls.

He touched on an already controversial issue that many fear will be exacerbated if a Shiite landslide is returned in the absence of Sunni voters: that Shiite parties must refrain from staffing the government only with their followers, a trend already apparent in the interim government.

Elections are now certain, Hasan, who heads a secular list contesting the election, told Reuters. But I ask the Shiites to look around them. You are in an Arab Sunni region. Who will come to your aid if you monopolize power? Look at the example of Saddam and what happens when political power is not used for the common good.

The Sunni groups — and I truly despise using this term because Iraq is truly a mixed nation — have not been frank either. Their argument about the illegitimacy of elections under occupation does not hold. Look at Japan and Germany after the Second World War, he added.

This issue is also bothering some Western officials, who admit that no matter how successful Election Day turns out to be in the numbers voting, a great deal is being asked of Iraqis about how they exercise their sovereignty. The parallel is with the Russian economy, said one British official. Everyone had high hopes when they had got rid of Soviet statism, but did not expect the chaotic and erratic results. We are asking an awful lot of the Iraqi people, who have no experience of a fully participatory democratic system, and who do not enjoy even the minimum levels of political trust.

We would have been OK if the Iraqi middle class had still been intact, but it had a huge hole blown in it in the past 14 years between the first and second Gulf wars. The people who might have been the motor of change were disempowered. Politically, Iraq is a damaged child. Its problems are long term.

The screw-up view of history sees U.S. foreign policy backfire again as, seduced by its own ideological certainty that all it does is right, it continues its project to create a series of failed and fragile states running seamlessly from the borders of Pakistan to within spitting distance of the Dead Sea. Osama bin Laden could not have planned it better.

Which leads to the question, is there any evidence at all that Bush’s new foreign policy team is likely to be more adept at dealing with Iran than with the previous two crises it confronted?

To deal with the issues first. Iran, it is true, presents a series of complex challenges. Operating by the same stretched criterion of distant threat that launched a war against Iraq, Iran appears more dangerous. It has an extant civil nuclear program and has mastered key nuclear-military technologies. It has long-range missiles that might eventually carry a warhead. It has a long history of hostility to Israel. Factions in Iran’s political order even now are interfering in Iraq. But the crucial issue is precisely what this agglomeration of detail means.

Seen from Washington, where all gaps these days seamlessly join up, it means that Iran is a hostile, terror-sponsoring state, meddling in Iraq and on the verge of acquiring weapons with which it could target Tel Aviv.

The European view, which has sought to negotiate a uranium enrichment freeze rather than confront Tehran, is more subtle and factors in the full spectrum of Iran’s intentions. Iran, seen from this vantage point, is an infinitely more complex construction, with power structures that are competitive and contradictory — with the greatest competition for a more open society coming from Iran’s younger generation.

Iran, too, displays a curious mind-set. Through its culture and recent history, it sees itself as a player on the world stage. It pricks America in Iraq because it can, not because it has greater ambitions than to have a friendly state next door. Its endless foot-dragging over nuclear inspections and declarations, seen in this light, is inward looking, defensive and as much about pride as hostile intentions.

Iran’s nuclear ambiguity — like Saddam’s over his retention of WMD — and its determination to show it has mastered key elements of the physics and engineering to make a bomb also serve a purpose. In a world where the U.S. has recently invaded two of Iran’s neighbors in quick order, there are hawks who believe in the value of a nuclear deterrent, even if that deterrent is as yet incomplete.

Iran, seen from the European viewpoint, feels compellingly real. Seen from Washington it feels like another overhyped threat.

Which leaves a dangerous paradox. For the risk is that the harder America pushes, the more prickly and dangerous Iran is likely to become. Like Iraq, it has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which begs the question, why precisely is Washington pushing so hard?

According to some senior diplomats it is in part a question of amour-propre, frustration that it is the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, that is handling the dossier, and the Europeans doing the talking. But it is more than that. In July Israel’s Knesset was presented with an annual intelligence assessment that said Iran (now that Iraq has been smashed) is its greatest threat. So we step toward confrontation once again. It is clear that Bush, unembarrassed by the fact that the intelligence used to justify the case for war against Saddam was cooked up, is playing the same game again.

The claim last week that U.S. intelligence had discovered Iran was close to modifying its missiles to take a nuclear payload, the Washington Post quickly revealed, had come from a single, unverified walk-in source.

There is a sense of déjà vu about all this: that realities once again are being concocted for ideological expediency. And that left to its own devices Washington will screw up the complex problem of Iran. This time Britain cannot be party to it.

The International Atomic Energy Agency is due to meet on Thursday to decide whether to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for being in breach of nonproliferation measures.

Sources close to the Bush administration have warned that British Prime Minister Tony Blair will have to choose between the E.U.’s pursuit of the diplomatic track and a more hard-line approach from the White House. While President Bush clearly favors more stick and less carrot, it is not yet clear what the stick might be: U.S. administration sources say targeted airstrikes — by either the U.S. or Israel — aimed at wiping out Iran’s fledgling nuclear program would be difficult because of a lack of clear intelligence about where key components are located.

Despite America’s attempt to turn up the heat on Iran, analysts remain deeply uncertain whether the increasingly bellicose noises that are coming from Bush administration figures represent a crude form of “megaphone” diplomacy designed to scare Iran into sticking to its side of the bargain, or evidence that Washington is leaning toward a new military adventure.

Details of the emerging Pentagon thinking come as U.S. officials have spent the past week turning up the pressure on Iran before the deal comes into force. U.S. officials are expected to meet with European diplomats and IAEA officials to complain about Iran’s continuing production of substantial quantities of uranium hexafluoride, which can be used in a weapons program. Although not explicitly barred in the accord, U.S. officials believe it amounts to a serious show of bad faith by Iran.

Speaking on the fringes of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum meeting in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, Bush ratcheted up the pressure on Iran. “It is very important for the Iran government to hear that we are concerned about their desires and we’re concerned about reports that show that, before a certain international meeting, they’re willing to speed up the processing of materials that could lead to a nuclear weapon,” Bush said.

Referring to the European countries that negotiated the deal with Iran, Bush added: “They do believe that Iran has got nuclear ambitions, as do we, as do many around the world.

“This is a very serious matter. The world knows it’s a serious matter, and we’re working together to solve this matter.”

Under a pact reached by the European countries and Iran last week, Iran is due to suspend all uranium enrichment, while it negotiates a deal in which it would receive trade incentives and peaceful nuclear technology.

Sunday, the British Foreign Office tried to play down fears that Iran is already breaching the deal that was negotiated with the E.U., insisting that the IAEA be allowed to issue its own verdict on Tehran’s compliance this week. “We will wait and see what the report is: The Iranians have got until Nov. 25,” said a spokesman.

But Whitehall sources said the U.K. accepted that Iran had a complex and extensive nuclear program that could not be shut down overnight. “There is a lot of speculation that is unfounded. Obviously there have been a lot of concerns in the past, but there’s a deal on the table and we hope that they will stick with it,” said one.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has just announced his resignation, told reporters that U.S. intelligence had seen hard evidence that Iran was close to putting a nuclear weapon on a long-range weapons system. The allegation was immediately challenged by officials in the State Department, who said the information, which had come from a single “walk-in” source, had yet to be verified.