Iraqi Constitution

Five more hours to go before the second extension to agree on a Constitution expires. According to the BBC, it doesn't look likely that there will be an agreement in time.

Although this sounds good:

A copy of the draft constitution circulated earlier in the week says that Iraq's future lies in a democratic, federal, republican system - free of sectarian or racial discrimination and with a fair distribution of wealth.

The details to work out are still quite dicey:

The outstanding issues from the Shia-Kurdish draft submitted on Monday included:

• federalism, and the way to form [federal] regions
• the terminology used in eradicating the influence of the former Baath regime - whether to use the term Baath party or Saddam's Baath
• structuring of authority between the presidency, parliament and the government.

The second point seems quite trivial to me, but it must be very important to them if they haven't agreed on a definition yet.

We'll see what happens.