The Shia of southern Iraq care more about electricity than religious power

'Delivery', that tired old word from British political discourse, is taking on a vibrant new meaning in the wake of the war in Iraq

It was late afternoon by the time we got to al-Kumait. The tomatoes laid out in the miserably stocked market were starting to rot, and the flies were swarming. The stench of two fish, decaying in the heat, was inescapable And the faces in the crowd that swiftly assembled, seemingly from nowhere, were creased with anxiety and impatience.

News still travels slowly through the mainly Shia province of Maysan to this impoverished village that sprawls along the Tigris some 200 miles south-east of Baghdad. Did we know whether there was still a prison at Ar Ramadi, and was it possible that Hanan Falk's brother Bashir and his uncle Mohan had been taken there when they were picked up by Saddam Hussein's secret police? And why hadn't the family of Taleb Joad, personally delighted to see the back of Saddam, been allowed by the Americans to investigate properly whether his son, imprisoned after the Gulf War of 1991, was still in one of the Baghdad prisons?

Some in the crowd angrily brandished phials of medicine to show they had passed their sell-by date. A handful of public servants complained, in terms already wearily familiar throughout Iraq, that they hadn't been paid for two months and that the handful of sparsely stocked little shops in the souk remained barred for fear of looters. One man, in exactly the terms that would most worry George Bush, complained that the US did not want an Iraq that would "join hands" with Iran. Others even remained convinced, despite what should have been the reassuring presence of the British paras, that it was not over for Saddam Hussein or for his genocidal henchman in the region, "Chemical Ali".

But above all they complained about the lack of electricity and fuel. Children were now drinking straight from the Tigris, said one man, generously writing down his name in spidery Roman characters, and then they were falling sick. Others were chopping down trees for firewood. A local sheikh, Karim Khali, said that Saddam Hussein was to blame for the chronic poverty in the village – "he destroyed these people" – but now all these forces, Saddam, the Americans and the British were to blame for its plight.

Of course, you couldn't be sure that the teacher with a degree from Basra University, who wanted to be described only by his initials, "refused" to join the Baath Party when urged to do so by its thuggish activists, as he claimed. He was not alone, however, in complaining that "before the war we didn't have our freedom, but we had water and electricity and no one looted, because he would have been shot if he did". But how could he expect everything to be better only a week after the end of a war? The reply was uncompromising. "Even one day is too long."

Which goes to the core of the emerging struggle by the occupiers for the hearts and minds of the occupied. On one model, hinted at by President Bush's warning to Tehran on Wednesday, this struggle, insofar as it exists at all, is between the competing ideologies of the free society, represented by the US, and the closed Islamic fundamentalist one, represented by the hardliners in Iran.

There is plenty in this that would be absurd to dismiss. It would be crazy, for example, to ignore the strong possibility that hard-line Iranian – or at the very least hard-line pro-Iranian – elements had a hand in the murder in Najaf of the leading clerical exile Abdel Majid al-Khoei. Or that similar groups have not been trying to exploit politically this week's massive pilgrimage to Najaf and Karbala. Al-Khoei was by many accounts a good man and a democrat, whose assassination may prove to be a serious setback to progress towards the modern liberal Muslim state everyone should hope Iraq will eventually be, and not the closed fundamentalist one others fear it might be.

But this is not the whole story. For it's also becoming clear that "delivery", that tired old word from British political discourse, is beginning to take on a vibrant meaning in the wake of a successfully prosecuted war against a wicked Iraqi regime. For the people of al-Kumait seem a lot less preoccupied with theology than with the humdrum challenges of everyday life. There is a tendency to split up the categories of "military", "political" and "humanitarian", as if they were somehow discrete, when they could hardly be more intimately intertwined. It's a truism that if security is inadequate, the humanitarian agencies – who, with some exceptions, have not yet even ventured into, for example, Basra – will hesitate to bring in equipment, including equipment designed to repair damaged water-treatment plants, if they have every reason to believe that it may end up being looted.

If the US military recognises some self-appointed interim civil administration committees and not others, as some have claimed that it has around Baghdad, then it becomes that much more difficult to achieve that security. Which is perhaps the key reason why the UN needs a role in political reconstruction. If being on such an administrative committee is seen as being a US creature, then the interim infrastructure may not be able to function.

And if at least some of the damage to an admittedly decrepit and neglected electricity and water supply was because of combat, including Allied bombing, as it surely was, then those repairs become all the more urgent as a means of persuading the population that you are on their side. And if the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance cannot move more swiftly to pay the employees in such plants, the task of persuasion becomes even more difficult.

It isn't of much comfort to the citizens of Basra, now bracing themselves for a possible outbreak of cholera, to be reminded that cholera was a frequent occurrence before the war. For they expected the ousting of Saddam to bring change. All they know is that the power supply, with all its implications for clean water and therefore public health, is at best running at about 45 per cent of its pre-war capacity.

It's easy to say that all this takes time. But the problem is that time is a commodity in short supply, if much of the population isn't going to turn its rage on the US, and seek solace from other directions. Some British Army officers, responsible for security in the mainly Shia south, understand this. They are freely expressing fears that the people of the Basra and Maysan provinces, ravaged by the Iran-Iraq war, will naturally lean towards Iran. The problem is an urgent one, but it has less to do with Iran than with the basics of life. This is why the Desert Rats' Commander, Graham Binns, mused aloud this week about the dangers of what he himself called a "failure of delivery" on the now conditional support of much of the population of Basra.

The part that George Bush didn't talk about on Wednesday matters most. Electricity and water will do much more to determine the political direction of Iraq than any number of Iranian agents.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk