Musical chairs in Baghdad

Eye on Iraq

UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 (UPI) -- It looks like curtains for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He is under attack from all sides. But when he goes nothing will change in Baghdad.

Maliki during his troubled months in office this year could do nothing to stem the widespread violence in his country. Indeed, it got vastly worse during his premiership and as a result of his policies.

But Maliki was no powerful figure for either good or evil. He was, as we predicted in these columns when he won parliamentary approval, just a piece of flotsam tossed up by the waves. The very democratic and parliamentary process that produced him as prime minister also guaranteed he would have to be a sectarian and divisive figure when he took office.

Maliki has already lost the confidence of the Bush administration because of his efforts to try and distance himself from it. The final straw was his insistence on gaining full operational control of all Iraqi military forces in his own hands.

Maliki's government had already angered Washington by cosying up to neighboring Iran. He was also dependent for most of his time in office on the parliamentary bloc loyal to Iraq's leading anti-American poltical figure, Moqtada al-Sadr. Yet now, Maliki has even lost Sadr's confidence. Sadr this week made clear he also wanted Maliki replaced.

Worst of all, during Maliki's time in office, the Iraq civil war has metastasized into a fully blown sectarian conflict between the Sunni and Shiite communities. Scores of thousands of Iraqis who could manage it have fled the country. Scores of thousands more are expected to flee in the coming weeks. Iraq has become a disaster area.

On Monday, White House Press Spokesman Tony Snow denied that the Bush administration was trying to topple Maliki and replace him. One wonders why he bothered. Everyone in Iraq knows that President George W. Bush last week bestowed his seal of approval on Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, another relatively prominent Shiite political leader from the Iraqi Islamic Party who journeyed to Washington to get Bush's seal of approval.

The U.S. aim is to produce a new Iraqi government that will squeeze Sadr out and marginalize him, while offering some carrots to moderate Iraqi Sunnis. Maliki offered them none.

Such a government, involving three Shiite parliamentary factions -- would, at least in theory, offer a new hope to bring Iraq back from the brink of a disintegration that could be virtually genocidal in its death toll, ferocity and chaos. But it looks as unlikely to succeed as Maliki or any of his predecessors did.

For over nearly four years, U.S. leaders have backed one wrong Iraqi horse after another: It started with Ahmed Chalabi, the corrupt, convicted bank embezzler beloved of Washington neo-conservatives and who had zero political support among his fellow Shiites in Iraq. A wave of other figures -- quickly promoted and equally instantaneously discarded -- followed.

The holding of full parliamentary elections a year ago was supposed to end this uncertainty, but it took a tortuous process of many months before Maliki's government was finally confirmed. By then, the very democratic process itself had polarized and fragmented Iraq far more thoroughly and disastrously than two and a half years of Sunni insurgency before it had ever managed to do.

Basic services across major areas of the country either totally collapsed or became even poorer than they had been in the years since U.S. forces toppled long-time dictator Saddam Hussein in April 2003. The showcase trial of Saddam, which Bush policymakers and neo-conservative strategists and pundits had long salivated over as the crowning set-piece of Iraq's miraculous transition from tyranny to enlightened democracy under their tutelage instead became a risable sideshow with no bearing whatsoever on the Hobbes-ian anarchy and horror into which the country had descended.

Iraq is not an almost-state, or a failed state. It is a non-state. The murderous but functional tyranny of Saddam was smashed by U.S. forces in March-April 2003. Since then, disastrously incompetent U.S. policies have failed to create a credible or functional state structure. The vast democratic parliamentary superstructure that was so painstakingly, even obsessively erected, over the past three years therefore rests on no realistic base at all. The Iraqi armed forces remain entirely unreliable and heavily infiltrated and subverted by the dominant militias, especially the Shiite ones.

It therefore does not matter who occupies the prime minister's office in Baghdad. Wisdom in Washington will only start to come when these hard truths are finally acknowledged.