LET us hope that Iraqis did not set much store by yesterday’s “international conference” in Brussels to discuss their country’s future.

America had promised the new Iraqi Government that it would hold the gathering. It was the first chance for Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Iraqi Prime Minister, and his senior colleagues to lobby the countries whose help they seek. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, attended, giving the gathering enough ballast to stop it floating away entirely.

She used the occasion to make another appeal to Syria to live up to its responsibilities and prevent the militants from crossing its porous border.

Faruq Shara, the Syrian Foreign Minister, was among her audience. The conference also gave France and Germany a chance to make encouraging noises about Iraq’s future and to paper over the rift with the US and Britain that gaped during the war. That was the idea, anyway, although inevitably the new rift within Europe itself did nothing to help.

But the US and Britain were never going to inject much substance into the meeting. Their intention was simply to orchestrate the expression of warm feelings, one British official said. The hardest kernel of the meeting — a call by Iraq for debt relief — was never going to be cracked, if only for the very good reason that Arab countries fear that they would lose one of their few levers over their troubled neighbour.

The figure in everyone’s minds yesterday, which on its own destroyed any chance of more financial pledges, was that the US has spent only $7 billion (£3.8 billion) of the $19 billion in economic aid that Congress appropriated two years ago. If the US cannot find ways of using that money, why should anyone else bother? The question is understandable. It can be no surprise, then, that only $2 billion of aid from other countries has materialised out of $13 billion pledged in Madrid in late 2003.

Nor does the US have an easy retort to why they should cough up with any urgency. Violence remains an almost insuperable barrier. The few private contractors who are operating in the south are doing so under the military umbrella or with lavish private security.

The slow progress of Mr al-Jaafari’s Government is another obstacle. It remains bogged down in constitutional questions, including, crucially, how much of a role to give to the Sunni minority.

Almost no reconstruction is taking place. Two years ago, before the insurgency took hold, US advisers were preoccupied with the practicalities of stitching the country’s electricity network together.

Preventing saboteurs from blowing up pylons was the biggest problem they thought they faced, while they waited for the money to flow in and do its work.

But although there has been some scattered investment in power stations, From the point of view of ordinary Iraqis, who are living with 50-degree heat and constant power cuts, nothing has changed.

That in turn breeds anger. The common accusation is that the US, the most powerful country in the world, could surely switch on the lights if it wished — so the only conclusion is that it does not.

Iraq has made one specific request in Brussels. It has called for relief from more of the $110 billion foreign debt incurred under Saddam Hussein.

Last year, the Paris Club of leading industrial nations agreed to forgive about $40 billion. But much of the rest is held by Iraq’s Arab neighbours, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. They are not going to give this up lightly.

Partly, this is because some of the debt represents reparations for war and has symbolic value for their people.

But it also represents one of the few levers that Sunni Arab countries have over Mr al-Jaafari’s Shia-led Government. Watching America struggle to exert its dwindling influence over the al-Jaafari team, they are hardly going to rush to give up such a valuable tool.

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