NOR DOES THE WEST SEEM TO FEEL IT:

'Sunnis never felt how much we suffered ...I can't stand seeing them in power' (DAMIEN CAVE, 9/02/07, Scotland on Sunday)

SHATHA al-Musawi, a Shi'ite member of parliament, first encountered the Sunni-Shi'ite divide on the day the Americans captured Saddam Hussein. Hearing the news with a close Sunni friend named Sahira, al-Musawi erupted like a child.

"I jumped, I shouted, I came directly to Sahira and I hugged her," al-Musawi said. "I was crying, and I said, 'Sahira, this is the moment we waited for.'"

At least it should have been: Saddam's henchmen killed al-Musawi's father when she was only 13; Sahira, too, was a victim, losing her closest uncle to the Saddam government.

But instead of celebrating, Sahira stood stiffly. A day later, al-Musawi said, Sahira's eyes were red from crying. And before long, like so many Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq, the two stopped talking.

Sectarianism has come to haunt her. She entered politics four years ago, flush with idealism, working closely with Sunnis on Iraq's Constitution and a draft law that would compensate victims of Saddam.

Now, even for her, one of parliament's most independent figures, the urge to reconcile is being blacked out by distrust and visceral anger.

Her disillusionment goes some way to explain why the Iraqi government has missed most of the political benchmarks laid down by Congress, as the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report due to be released this week.

The GAO stated that at least 13 of the 18 political and security goals for the Iraqi government have not been met.

Al-Musawi's explanation for the quagmire are personal. After seeing Sunni neighbours kill Shi'ite friends, and after being pushed out of her own home by violence, she has struggled to move beyond the pain and anger. And at the simple apartment in the Green Zone that she shares with her second husband (a Sunni Kurd), al-Musawi, 40, described a score of abuses. [...]

In parliament three months ago, she shouted down her colleagues for standing by as Sunni extremists in Diyala Province killed hundreds of Shi'ites. When the speaker, a Sunni, smirked, she screamed: "Why are you laughing, Mr Speaker? I want to know why you're laughing." (He waved her away: "Leave it to the women," he said.)

Al-Musawi also now defends some actions of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, saying that it has filled a necessary void.

"The government couldn't protect the people," she said. "They couldn't save them. The Sadrists did that."

When asked about accusations that the Mahdi Army forced innocent Sunnis out of the Hurriya neighbourhood, which borders Adel, she said Shi'ites had no time to sift the innocent from the guilty because Sunnis were killing Shi'ites.

She says too many Sunnis will never accept Shi'ite rule. They even refuse to accept responsibility for the sins of Saddam or today's extremists.

"The Sunnis never felt how much we suffered," she said.