I kept trying to tell people during last year’s negotiations that Prime Minister Maliki’s goal wasn’t necessarily to force the Americans out, but rather to ensure that if they stayed, it would be on the Iraqi government’s terms.

By that, I mean that instead of supporting a (mythical) nascent democracy as it gains momentum, U.S. troops would more likely be subcontractors used by a partisan/sectarian regime to suppress its opponents.

I’d disagree with Southern Dragon (#4) in that I don’t think the US is going to get 75% oil profits at the end of the rainbow; instead, Maliki will milk the US for as much as he can (in terms of using our troops to suppress the opposition du jour), then leave us with as little as possible in exchange when those troops leave.

I’d also note that Sadr seems to be looking a re-allying with Maliki, albeit from a weaker position than before. In fact, perhaps the best way to understand what’s been going on in Iraq the past few years is to remember that when Maliki took office in 2006, he was universally seen as a weak compromise figure, doomed to be batted around by the strong factions vying for power in Iraq: Sadr, Hakim, the Kurdish parties, the insurgents in the Sunni provinces, and the United States.

Three years later, all of those factions have less (in most cases, far less) leverage now than they did in 2006. The only actor who has gained leverage is Maliki. And it’s safe to assume that he will do his best to apply that leverage toward making sure the trend continues.

The Bush administration imposed the fiction of an “Iraqi people” on us as part of its elaborate justification for war, just as it has fed us the notion that their is such a thing as the “Iraqi government”. But they never did anything to try and make it real.

Instead, the commanders in Iraq were left trying to fit the facts to the story as best they can at any given moment. They made temporary alliances. They used the “Salvador Option” Shiite militias to get a temporary reprieve from the Baathist insurgents. They used Sunni tribesmen and Baathist insurgents reborn as “Sons of Iraq” to fight the jihadis. They used a Shiite militia called “the Iraqi Army” to beat back the Shiite Sadrists. They used Sunni Kurdish Peshmerga to fight Sunni Arabs and Arab Shiite guerillas to attack Iran, which angered pro-Iranian Kurds. There has never been anything like a real strategy–just a lot of treading water.

To make it worse, throughout it all, American commanders have been getting their advice from a menagerie of overt and covert Saudi, Israeli, Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian agents, all of whom are using us for their own purposes.

We need to just need to get out. The best we (and the Iraqis) can hope is that, once we are gone, a stable Kurdish state will manage to hold together without provoking the Turks and that Iran will step in to pacify the Shiite east. But we can’t make anything happen at thi point.

first you send Bremer to get rid of the Iraqi army later you hire them then later you shoot at them. I’m confused