A dissent from TPM Reader BL …
You write,
“What we have here is a situation where there is a nominal government (which none of the contending parties seems particularly interested in overthrowing) . . . ”
This is not correct. The Sunni Arab sectarian resistance — the movement commonly referred to as “the insurgency,” which has been responsible for most attacks on U.S. forces and which the U.S. is today fighting in Anbar and elsewhere, does not accept the legitimacy of the current government and is indeed particularly interested in overthrowing it.
Other factions have substantial representation within the current government, but they differ as to the ultimate shape the Iraqi constitutional order should take, and find the current feckless government to be convenient because it means that they can rule local areas as warlords, without interference from the useless Iraqi state. If the Iraqi government ever becomes a problem for them, they will stop tolerating it.
That’s why, of course, Maliki can’t really do anything to “disarm the militias.”
This is a good rejoinder to what I wrote. I guess I would only say that this strikes me as the eventual but not necessarily the proximate goal of the Sunni insurgency. My sense is that they’re trying to make the country ungovernable and trying to get us out. Presumably, in their thinking, the fall of the current government follows on either or both of those goals being achieved.
