Iraq Disintegrates & America Yawns

The downward spiral of events in Iraq give me an outsized feeling of omnipotence, but then I'm brought up short.

Who other than a Bush Era apologist, which I am most certainly not, would be surprised that the military gains of the Surge strategy have been squandered by a feckless Baghdad government that has, by its actions and inactions, engineered the return of the insurgency, a level of sectarian violence not seen in a couple of years, and the reality that Prime Minister Al-Maliki's political career is in the shitter. And that all of these things are occurring right on schedule: That is, as the drawdown of American troops accelerates.

These things also are happening because of the bomb and not the ballot box, and as far as most Americans are concerned, are happening on another planet because of a paucity of news media coverage and that Yankee inscrutability: If we don't care about it then it doesn't exist.

Al-Maliki's fall has been precipitous and nothing is more symbolic of that than massive truck bombings that destroyed the Foreign and Finance ministries on August 19, killing 95 people. The consensus view is that the attacks were telegraphed and came off because of the collusion of insurgents and Iraqi security forces.

Not exactly what the guarantor of a safe, stable and American troop-free Iraq had been preaching.

In fact, violent deaths in Iraq hit a 13-month high in August. Some 456 people -- 393 civilians, 48 police and 15 Iraqi soldiers -- were killed in what was the highest toll since July 2008.

The body count, however, is merely a distraction. It is what is going on beyond the violence that has spelled likely defeat for Al-Maliki in national elections scheduled for January.

Although Al-Maliki is a Shiite, the majority sect's elders never trusted him and he owes his job to merely having been the least bad choice when he took office in 2006. Nobody is buying his post-"Bloody Wednesday" bombing pronouncement that a coalition with the minority Sunnis and marginalized Kurds will cure what ails Iraq. These three groups have been able to agree about nothing, whether it is power sharing, divvying up oil revenues or when or whether the Americans should leave.

One sign of the prime minister's shaky standing was the discovery this week of caches of weapons stockpiled by his Shiite political rivals.

Meanwhile, the American withdrawal, scheduled to be completed by the end of august 2010, is well under way. Seven U.S. soldiers died in Iraq in August, the lowest number since the 2003 invasion, in large part because they're trying to stay out of harm's way. Some 4,336 Americans in all have perished, but then who's counting?

Top photograph by The Associated Press