(This is a longer version of this article than in the printed paper). According to the sober, mainstream International Crisis Group, reporting on 26 September, "the situation [in Iraq] appears to be heading towards de facto partition and full-scale civil war".
The much-battered Iraqi labour movement, for all its weaknesses, is the only big movement in the country which reaches across Sunni-Shia and Kurdish-Arab sectarian lines, and which can be a motor force for a free, democratic, and secular Iraq. Practical solidarity with it, against the Transitional Government, against the occupying forces, and against the "resistance" militias, is more important than ever.
Sunni-supremacist, Islamist or neo-Ba'thist, "resistance" activity has increased and become more openly anti-Shia. The Shia-Kurdish alliance on which Iraq's shaky Transitional Government (installed in May) rests is fracturing. On 2 October a spokesperson for (Kurdish) president Talabani demanded the resignation of (Shia) prime minister Jaafari.
On 3 October Talabani retracted, but the Kurds and Shias are at odds over Kirkuk, centre of the northern oil industry. Kirkuk was historically a Kurdish city; Saddam Hussein forcibly "Arabised" it; the Kurds reckon they got an agreement with the Shia to "re-Kurdise" it, and the Shia are stalling.
An opinion survey in Baghdad in August found 90% of the people saying the Transitional Government had done "badly" on restoring electricity supplies, 77% saying it had done "badly" on jobs, 74% on corruption, 68% on working towards getting rid of the occupation forces, and 67% on security.
After a supposedly "final" wording of the constitution was agreed on 28 August, haggling over amendments continued up to the last minute, and only on 3 October, just twelve days before the constitution referendum on 15 October, has the United Nations started to distribute an official text.
Justin Alexander, who was a UN legal adviser in the constitution drafting process, says that: "If it wasn't so incredibly serious I would say the constitution drafting process is a complete joke... [now] almost any outcome in [the referendum] is likely to be divisive".
Under US pressure, the Transitional Government added fifteen (unelected) Sunni Arab figures to the constitution drafting committee. But the process became so much dominated by haggling between the Shia and the Kurds that those Sunnis were marginalised, and all of them have now repudiated the final text.
Al Qaeda would reject any constitution as an impious infringement on the authority of ancient Islamic texts. Some of the other Sunni-supremacist "resistance" forces see the text as not Islamic enough.
But almost all Sunni figures, including the sort of people who took part in the Interim Governing Council and the Interim Government, reject the constitution's version of federalism, which devolves very large powers (and probably, though the text is murky, large shares of oil income) from Baghdad to the "regions".
Many Sunnis had accepted, if reluctantly, that the Kurds would win substantial autonomy. The constitution also allows for any other group of provinces to form itself into a "region". The current, US-designed, Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), allows for "regions" but limits them to three provinces and does not give them such great powers.
The new provisions mean that the whole south could form itself into a "region" and take its revenge for the old process whereby the money from the southern and northern oilfields flowed into Baghdad. Shia advocates of southern autonomy like SCIRI (a major element in the Transitional Government) dominate in those southern provinces.
Sunni Arabs fear that they will be left with a rump statelet around Baghdad, landlocked and without oil money. Some Shia Islamists - notably those led by Moqtada al-Sadr, whose main base is in Baghdad - oppose the constitution's version of federalism for the same reason.
Both the southern Shias' and northern Kurds' resentment at past disadvantage, and the Sunni Arabs' current fears, have a real basis. Whoever else might establish a workable compromise, "the disparate class of former exiles and expatriates that has ruled Iraq [under US protection] since the war" (as the ICG calls it) cannot.
Thus, as US academic Juan Cole puts it, "this entire constitutional process has ensured the intensification and continuation of the Sunni Arab guerrilla war for many years".
The USA hurried along the constitution-making process because it wanted some quick progress to enable it to start withdrawing troops. It has withdrawn troops from the Shia cities of Karbala (at the end of September) and Najaf (in August); but there is no sign that this is the start of a calm transition.
The Transitional Government relies on the US military to prop it up; the Iraqi army, on the US commanders' own account, is too fragile to fight the "resistance"; but the brutal, arrogant US military presence drives people into the arms of the "resistance" and discredits the government.
On 3 October the Shia/Kurdish-dominated Assembly reinterpreted the rules for the referendum to make it almost certain that the constitution will pass, despite almost all Sunni Arabs and a lot of Shias being strongly against it.
Endorsement from Ayatollah Sistani and the Kurdish warlord leaders gives the constitution an almost certain overall majority on a communal-headcount basis, even if the voters are not keen on it. But there is a rule (initially adopted to reassure the Kurds) that the constitution will fall if two-thirds vote against it in three of Iraq's provinces. Sunni-Arab forces have a majority in some provinces, and the Sadrists in at least one.
The Assembly has reinterpreted the rule to require two-thirds of eligible voters, not two-thirds of actual voters, against. Given that Iraqis will probably have to brave death threats from Al Qaeda and others even to get to the polling stations, this makes rejection almost impossible. Latest reports are that Sadr will sit out the referendum rather than campaigning for rejection, and that the most "moderate" Sunni group, the Iraq Islamic Party (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) will be low-key about its "no" vote.
The Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions of Iraq, led by the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, has denounced the constitution fiercely (indeed, exaggeratedly, as "fascist"). The General Union of Oil Employees (based in Basra) has, as far as we know, made no statement (the GUOE leadership is close to Sistani, but the union is politically diverse). The Iraqi Workers' Federation - the new grouping formed by the merger on 20 September of the Communist-Party-led Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions with the rump GFTU and GFITU - says it "supports the draft in general", though all its specific comments on it are highly critical of the constitution's endorsement of Islamic law and its version of federalism.
Presumably the IWF's calculation is that, bad though the constitution is, rejection will be even worse. Even that cannot be certain.
Sunni supremacists will be the strongest forces opposing the constitution, stronger than the democrats and socialists who object to the constitution's Islamism and its near-silence on labour rights. (The constitution deletes wording in the TAL which recognises the right to strike, and its one clause talking about the right of unions to exist is entirely nullified by the government's Decree 875 which authorises the government to seize all union funds). For the constitution to fall would embolden the Sunni supremacists, and it would discredit the Shia-Kurdish Transitional Government.
But a constitution "approved" in the current fashion will also discredit the government - and inflame the Sunni opposition. It will be worse, not better, than the TAL.
New elections are due in December whether the constitution passes or falls. At present a wider range of Sunni groups talk of participating than in the elections of 30 January this year, but whether that wider participation will actually happen, after the referendum and, quite probably, two further months of slide towards civil war, is another question. Also uncertain is whether groups like the Worker-communist Party of Iraq will take the opportunity of the election to offer an alternative to sectarian politics (they boycotted January's poll).
Every passing week confirms how foolish it would be to give support or credence to the Americans on the strength of their general desire to install some sort of bourgeois democracy in Iraq, a desire which is irreparably tainted by their imperialist, neo-liberal methods and interests. It would be doubly foolish to give support or credence to Talabani-Jaafari and their bungled constitution, when they have practically no democratic intentions, on the strength of the idea that they may, by compliance to the Americans, be more willing to accommodate some democratic rights than their Sunni-sectarian opponents would be.
Only by mobilising for solidarity with the Iraqi labour movement, to equip and encourage it to emerge as a politically independent force, can we make a positive contribution.