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Any constitution that sets the stage for partition, or any disintegration of Iraq in the absence of a constitution, would certainly be the death knell for Mr. Bush's vow to keep the country whole.

For years, "unified" was the mantra in Washington's Iraq policy. "The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq," Mr. Bush told the United Nations in 2002.

But "unified" now looks as shaky as the President's original premise for war and the long-faded hopes that Iraqis would welcome U.S. invaders as liberators.

Partition, once unthinkable in policy circles and certainly unmentionable as the Bush administration shifted from one failing postwar strategy to the next, is increasingly being seen as a possible outcome, both inside and outside Iraq.

Senior Shia clerics, probably the most powerful voices in all Iraq, have suggested that the oil-rich south, home to several of Islam's holiest cities and the long-oppressed Shia majority, wants at least as much autonomy as the Kurds, who have lived in a semi-independent -- albeit unrecognized -- state sprawled across the green and mountainous north for more than a decade.

Iraq, forged by the British from the war-torn scrap of the collapsed Ottoman empire, survived as a single state only because of the iron fists of monarchs and, in more recent decades, former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Despite that, there is a fear that its disintegration could trigger unpredictable consequences for all of its uneasy neighbours -- Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. Some critics now say that the policy pledge of trying to keep Iraq whole was always doomed. "Iraq is the last, multiethnic state, left over from the First World War," said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador with experience in both the Balkans and Iraq.

"Democracy killed the Soviet Union, it killed Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and it will kill Iraq," he said in an interview from Baghdad.

"A managed breakup is not easy, but it will be less violent than a forced and unhappy union," said Mr. Galbraith, now a senior diplomatic fellow at the Washington-based Center for Arms Control.

Whether Iraqis solve the current constitutional conundrum, the forces tearing the country apart may be too strong for any document to contain.

A host of issues, ranging from whether the new Iraq should be a republic or an "Islamic republic," to the role, if any, of sharia law, bedevil drafters. But the big issue is what price the Shia majority and the already autonomous Kurds are willing pay to placate the Sunni minority, who have lost the 75-year-domination of Iraq power structures.

The Sunnis have little leverage, save perhaps the grim reality that they will remain the embittered minority in which the insurgency thrives.

"Any finished document may be virtually meaningless," said Ivan Eland, senior fellow and director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the right-wing Independent Institute.

He doubts any document can prevent Iraq from coming apart. Worse, he said, he believes the window for a peaceful breakup has already closed. "It's too late for a controlled partition," he said.

Others are less gloomy. But they also warn that a decentralized, perhaps even confederal state is the only hope for a stable Iraq.

"The paradox is the only way to keep the country together is to make it as decentralized as possible," said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

By some measures, postwar Iraq is already three nations. The Shia south, oil-rich home to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, is a mostly calm region secured by local militias largely loyal to powerful clerics. It is also increasingly religious, shedding the secular sheen that characterized Sunni rule from the centre.

Nascent Kurdistan occupies the north, which has survived since the end of the Persian Gulf war and is now thriving as Kurds secure control of Kirkuk, the northern oil capital. It is also mostly quiet, secured by legions of seasoned peshmerga fighters.

Neither south nor north are yet close to happy, functioning societies, but both are far better off than in the years of Saddam Hussein's brutal oppression.

Iraq is seized by violence only in the centre: Baghdad, and the mostly Sunni towns to the west and beyond in the vast, mostly unpopulated desert stretching to Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. There, more than 130,000 U.S. troops and a similar number of newly created, not yet fully trained, Iraqi police and soldiers are failing to quell an insurgency.

In Baghdad, where Kurds, Sunnis and Shia have intermingled for centuries, partition seems as impossible as it did in Sarajevo. But as violence increases -- more than 1,500 people in Baghdad died violently last month -- a sad exodus is stripping the capital of its multiethnic mix.

Many rich Shiites and Sunnis have already decamped, some to neighbouring countries. No reliable figures exist, but foreign observers also claim many Baghdad Kurds have headed north.

Even those with the most at stake in seeing a successful constitutional settlement and a functioning federal Iraq aren't convinced that it will work.

"Federalism is a way to integrate Iraqi Kurdistan into Iraq," says Jalal Talabani, Iraq's current President and a Kurd.

"If it works, great, and if Iraqi Kurds start benefiting from the state of Iraq, then you'll probably hear the nationalistic voices, the Kurdish nationalistic voices, quieting down and actually be happy being part of Iraq. But . . . if Kurds do not benefit from the state of Iraq, then why should they be condemned . . . to live in [it]?"

Even the most optimistic see a federal state as a least-worst solution. The key tradeoff is whether the Sunni minority accepts its fall from omnipotence in exchange for decent living standards fuelled by oil from the Shia-dominated south and Kurdish-dominated north.

"If the Sunnis don't sign up to this dispensation . . . they will be stuck with the status quo, or less, in an oil-less, landlocked, Sunnistan of their own making," Bartle Breese Bull, a historian with extensive experience in Iraq, wrote earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal.

Overshadowing the enormous difficulties of gluing Iraq together are fears that the disintegration of the country would trigger terrible and unpredictable consequences.

Doomsayers fear an Iraqi breakup will roil an already troubled region. The prospect that a Shia statelet in the south would soon become allied with -- perhaps even subsumed by -- the theocracy of co-religionists in neighbouring Iran remains a major worry for Washington and Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile Turkey, Iran and Syria -- all with their own restive Kurdish populations -- remain staunchly opposed to an independent Kurdistan, although whether one would ease, rather than foment, secessionist sentiments in other countries is an open question.

And an impoverished Sunnistan in the centre could replace the Taliban-run Afghanistan as a locus and training ground for Islamic radicals.

The counterargument is that an agreed separation funded by shared oil revenue, rather than a messy, violent divorce, might spawn three, functioning and civil democracies in the Middle East, much as the successor states in Yugoslavia have demonstrated remarkable democratic and economic progress in the decade since the guns were silenced.

Iraq divided

Negotiators in Iraq are trying to hammer out a proposed constitution to meet a Monday deadline. But talks have been hampered by lingering disagreements over key issues. Perhaps most pressing is the extent of autonomy that will be granted to the key ethnic and religious groups in the country - Shiite, Sunnite and Kurd.

ETHNIC GROUPS (as a percentage of total population)

Shia Arab: 60%

Sunni Arab: 20%

Kurd: 15%

Other (Turkman, Assyrian): 5%