Over the weekend, Iraq's constitutional convention finished its work and submitted a draft of the historic document to the country's parliament, the National Assembly. Negotiators for Iraq's Sunni minority rejected the document and now it will be up to the country's Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni voters to determine the country's political fate. This prospect has many papers jittery on Monday -- after all, if no political agreement can be found between the conflicting ethnic groups and the people vote against the constitution, peace, so the argument goes, will continue to elude the country.

"The lack of success couldn't have been more spectacular," writes the center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung. America's ambassador in Baghdad was part of the negotiations, dealing with every detail and helping right up to the last second. The president of the superpower also grabbed the phone and tried to push for a final compromise. But it was all in vain: Even if a formal draft of the constitution has been put forward, the negotiations have failed because the Sunnis are refusing to provide their support. Thus, "the United State's strategy of bringing together quarrelling groups of Iraqis by quickly creating a government and constitution is about to fall into a shambles." "The calculus of the Bush administration was as clear as it was simple: to show a long-hoped for sign of progress in Iraq it could have used at home to quiet the growing chorus of war opponents and people harboring doubts about it." For the Iraqis, it would have demonstrated stability in their political process. But now, the paper notes, criticism of Bush will only grow and not even his forced optimism will have any effect. Worse, if the Sunnis totally abandon the political process after rejecting the constitution they could fall into the arms of extremists and insurgents -- thus throwing Iraq into a spiral of violence. "If that happens, the Americans in Iraq will not only have failed politically, but also militarily."

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is also wary of the latest developments. "The constitutional convention failed to achieve its political goal of providing a comprehensive consensus," the editorial states. The Shiites and the Kurds agreed to the document, but the Sunnis rejected it. And if the Sunnis exert their veto power in three of the provinces they control, the draft would become a "blemish" on the political process. Worse yet, it would also throw Iraq back to the situation it was in before January elections, and the process of creating a constitution would have to start all over again. This first attempt, the paper continues, is threatened with failure because of two dilemmas that negotiators failed to resolve. First, it takes a considerable amount of time to draft a constitution even under circumstances that are less complicated than those in Iraq -- and this was a real rush job. But Iraq doesn't have much time. "It needs a constitution quickly in order to pull the floor out from beneath the feet of the terrorists and insurgents," it continues. "The problem is that under enormous time pressure, the negotiators just swept the fundamental differences between a deeply divided Iraqi society under the rug." The paper warns that any constitution to go into effect without the support of all three groups would be a "time bomb" which would detonate a civil war down the road. The second dilemma is going to be harder to solve. "The Sunnis have ruled the Mesopotamian country for hundreds of years, but now the tables have turned," it concludes. "The Sunnis are none too happy about the prospect of having to yield majority power to the Shiite majority. Meanwhile, the Shiites and Kurds want to break from this past -- radically."

The conservative daily Die Welt celebrates the fact that Iraq now has a constitution that its citizens can vote on. But then it qualified this statement, writing: "Whether this will now be the moment of birth of a new, Islamic-democratic model state, is in no way certain." The work of the constitutional convention should be honored in every way -- and its task of creating a new democratic order based on civil rights and freedom after decades under a murderous dictator is no small thing. And to expect the Iraqis, who are starting at zero to create a constitution that would define an entire Iraqi identity would be the same as expecting a magician to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Nor can you expect that they will be able to harmonize the autonomous tendencies of the Shiites and Kurds with the centralized (government) desired by the Sunnis.