CAUTIOUS hope — that is the view justified by the first details of Iraq’s referendum on its draft constitution.

“I am nervously optimistic,” a senior United Nations official said yesterday as reports came in.

There are two pieces of solid good news. First, there was little violence, compared with the elections in January for the provisional Government. Secondly, large numbers of Iraqis appear to have voted.

Turnout is said to have been above 60 per cent overall, and even higher in some of the key Sunni areas that boycotted the January elections. This shows that, for the moment, Iraqis are prepared to embrace the framework of building a democracy set by the coalition and their own temporary Government.

“This is very good news,” a senior British official said yesterday. “It seems that Sunnis have joined the political process, and any hope for Iraq depends on that process.”

This is some comfort to those who feared that, under the pressure of three years of growing violence, Iraqis may retreat into their own ethnic groups and rely on their own militias, not laws and politics, to keep each other at bay.

But that bleak vision cannot be dismissed yet. Britain and the US have been adamant that they wanted Iraqis to back the constitution in this referendum. On early reckonings, that is the most likely outcome of this vote.

If the constitution does pass, the next step will be elections in December for a permanent government. That would appoint new ministers and begin interpreting the constitution on the many crucial areas where it is silent.

Could that lead to the break-up of Iraq? Many Sunnis objected to the draft constitution because of the autonomy it allows the three Kurdish provinces in the north — and, by extension, the nine Shia provinces in the south.

Their fear was that a permanent government (inevitably dominated by the Shia majority) would divide the country, leaving Sunnis in the middle with no natural resources.

That seems less likely than a month ago. Just days before the referendum, the Sunnis, backed by the coalition, won important concessions. That shows that the coalition still has influence, and that Shias and Kurds can be swayed by the case for keeping the country together.

If Sunnis take part in the December elections as energetically as they appear to have done this weekend, then they will have a much more important role in the new government than they did in writing this constitution.

What can the coalition do? Its influence will drop further after December when the permanent government is in place. Its main lever is the presence of troops — and that itself is a controversial contribution. The growing pressure on President Bush and Tony Blair to withdraw troops is very visible, not least in Iraq.

The coalition can do some things. It can continue to train security services, the police and the army, and urge that their ethnic and religious mix reflects the population.

It can urge the appointment of more competent ministers than in the past at the crucial posts of Interior and Defence. It can also work on delivering the many small improvements to people’s lives, beginning with electricity, which may convince them that their prospects are better than under Saddam Hussein.

It can also put pressure on Arab governments to back the new Government. They have been conspicuous by their reticence, out of nervousness that their own Shia minorities may demand more power, and unwillingness to be seen to back an unpopular, US-led war.

And if the constitution does not pass? The framework says that Iraqis would then elect a new temporary government in December, write a new constitution and try again.

That is not disaster, although it would strain the nerves of Iraqis and coalition leaders alike, and make an early exit for the coalition much harder.

THE CONSTITUTION'S MAIN POINTS

Iraq is a multi-ethnic part of the Islamic world and its Arab people are part of the Arab nation

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