Between L’Affaire McCrystal, Wikileaks and the Giant Pile O’Documents and the ongoing Karzai family circus, most Americans, to the extent they’re paying attention at all, are focused on Afghanistan. It’s important to remember that there are still a LOT of Americans in Iraq, and things in Baghdad, well, they could be better. Perhaps people believe, as John McCain dismissively reports, we’ve “already won that one”. Have we? What, exactly, have we “won” there? Is the US safer, the region more stable, the Iraqi people’s lives improved? Is it safe in Iraq? Is there a stable, responsible, effective government? How about a job and some electricity? And for those who would say “well, at least Saddam’s no longer running the place” I’d simply ask: “Oh. Is it on to Sudan and al Bashir next?”

Certainly, the US withdrawal continues as negotiated, and the 50,000 members of the American Armed forces still in country are magically transformed into something other than “combat forces”. They had a peaceful, reasonably fair election back in March. Of course, that election has yielded no government, and Parliament has met once, for a couple minutes, since. Nouri al-Maliki oversees a caretaker government without a functioning legislature, and as the summer drags on, problems go unaddressed and the tension rises.

The natural coalition government that would include State of Law, INA and the Kurds is a non-starter unless Maliki steps down. Iraqiya could very likely form a coalition government too, but NOBODY seems to want Ayad Allawi to be Prime Minister again. Hmm, political progress stymied because huge egos refuse to put country ahead of party and personal power. I’m sensing a theme here. The thing is, from a military/internal security viewpoint, Maliki’s actually done pretty well. From a government services/economic growth/popular reconciliation standpoint, he’s a failure. When you think about it, he’s Saddam lite, now with less crimes against humanity.

Any government that can ultimately be formed will obviously be fragile and indecisive. And in that environment of weak federal governance, corruption and animosity, there is every likelihood that the factions will come to violence. And indeed, Iraq does not lack for factions. There is the obvious, the Shiite and Sunni blocks, with a long history of oppression and hatred turned upside down by the American invasion. There are the Kurds, militarily powerful, economically successful, autonomous from Baghdad’s authority, eyeing Kirkuk in a standoff with it’s Arab residents in a confrontation nobody expects to end peacefully, waiting for what they perceive as the right conditions to move. They might well perceive the replacement of Maliki as Prime Minister by someone less closely aligned with the Army as providing those conditions. However, if the Kurds become too powerful, there is Turkey and Iran, and the possibility of an outright war on the border. There are the people, economically deprived, largely unemployed, politically unrepresented, lacking services such as clean water and reliable electricity. The prospects for a coup and a strongman, another civil war, a regional war or any one of a dozen scenarios of a failed state descending into anarchy and violence seem only to go higher every day there is no progress. And of course, there is always the risk that America will get sucked back in, trying to prevent her greatest blunder from turning into something much, much worse.

The longer Iraq goes without a real government, with no constitutional authority or representation, the more the tattered rags of her fledgling quasi-democracy slip away. As time passes, opinions harden and coalitions become harder, not easier, to build. Indeed, now INA has drawn a line in the sand – no coalition with al-Maliki as Prime Minister, period. One wonders at this point if a government is formed without State of Law, will Maliki willingly step down? And if he refusese to do so, will the Army support and institutionalize his extra-constitutional rule? And what will the US do then?

The fragility of the Iraqi nation as a whole, it’s immense oil wealth and it’s vulnerability to incompatible outside influences from Tehran to Riyadh to Beijing to Washington makes it a huge international issue, with implications for global trade, regional peace and American interests. With Iraq as a huge Shiite-majority client state, Iran becomes the dominant regional power, and the role of counterweight to Iranian hegemony falls to Saudi Arabia – with all it’s ugly implications for middle-east peace and the global economy.

To me, Afghanistan is a failure, the ultimate triumph of politics over strategy, but it is in no way the unmitigated disaster that Iraq has been, and might very well be again. No one knows what’s going to happen. But the signs and portents are ominous, and there’s no clear way to get from here to some relatively good outcome without a whole lot of pain in between. As Tom Ricks said in The Gamble: “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered by us and by the world have not yet happened.”