In eight days or so, Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq, will stand up in the vast conference centre in Baghdad with Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special representative in Iraq. Between them will be the man who has been selected to be the first prime minister of post-Saddam Iraq.

Already the position has been offered to one - as yet unnamed - candidate who has yet to accept the job, his identity known only to senior officials in London, Washington and Rome and other capitals of the coalition forces. On his shoulders rest the hopes for a peaceful outcome for Iraq.

For, as officials make clear, it will be in the announcement of the identity of the new prime minister and not the formal June 30 date for hand-over of sovereignty.

Few have any doubts that the new prime minister will have much time to make a difference in a country whose mood has soured against the occupying powers; perhaps a month at most. The brightest outlook is that embraced by London, Washington and the Coalition Provisional Authority.

It envisages a new beginning, with the announcement of a new prime minister and interim government and, following the progress towards elections next year and the drafting of a permanent constitution, optimists hope that Iraqis will work towards a democratic civil society and the marginalization of the men of violence.

"A lot of weight will fall on the shoulders of the new prime minister," concedes David Richmond, Britain's special representative in Baghdad. "I think he will have a fine line to walk from his appointment at the end of May until the handover at the end of June, and he will have to deliver a message that there should be no sectarianism."

It is only one of the messages that the new prime minister - who is likely to be drawn from the Shia majority - will have to get across if the transfer of power to a new government is to work.

While the new prime minister is working with his new government, Richmond explains, he will also need to convince Iraqis of all backgrounds that the interim government represents an end to occupation and a step towards elections next year.

"On June 30," says Richmond, "there is going to be a real change. The occupation is going to end. The Coalition Provisional Authority is going to be dissolved. Ambassador Paul Bremer will leave."

It will be a new start. And the view shared by Tony Blair and by George Bush is that, given the right leadership, Iraq has the capacity to heal itself, in the process of building a new civic society that will eventually marginalize those involved in the present violence.

What happens next, he believes, is up to Iraqis, with the security support of what will then be known as the multinational forces, which will be there at the invitation of the new government.

"What I am struck by is how many Iraqis say they do not define themselves as Shia or Sunni, but Iraqi, which is why I am optimistic that it will work and that, over time, this belief in Iraq will grow. We will get over this period of instability and the elections next year will work."

Richmond is optimistic, too, that Iraqis will pursue consensus rather than divide over guarantees for minority rights or the role of religion in the state, issues that divide the more secular Kurds and the majority Shias.

The most depressing scenario is that the very same mechanisms that Richmond hopes will lead to greater cohesion - a new government, elections and negotiations for a permanent constitution - have the opposite effect, becoming the focus for irreconcilable differences between the ethnic groups.

This second scenario is one that has been propounded by the former US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, a veteran of the fracturing wars of the former Yugoslavia, who also served with the UN in East Timor.

"Americans like to think that every problem has a solution, but that may no longer be true in Iraq," wrote Galbraith in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books.

"Early in 2005," believes Galbraith, "Iraq is likely to see a clash between an elected Shia-dominated central government trying to override the interim constitution in order to impose its will on the entire country, and a Kurdistan government insistent on preserving the de facto independent status that Kurdistan has enjoyed for 13 years.

"Complicating the political struggle is a dispute over the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, involving Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Sunni Turkmen and Shia Turkmen. "It is a formula for civil war."

A second version of Galbraith's doomsday scenario was presented last week in a more unexpected place, the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army's War College, which published a 69-page report entitled "Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities and Insights".

Its authors point to a second fault line in Iraq that they believe could also lead to civil war, again with its roots not in the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle, but within the Shia majority. And author W. Andrew Terrill believes that the difficulties being faced in the transition of sovereignty should not be underestimated. -Dawn/The Observer News Service.