The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki's accusation that Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi has been ordering the bombing and assassination of political opponents has caused the fragile coalition government to collapse and taken Iraq close to the kind of sectarian violence that followed the United States-led invasion in 2003. It has also exposed the hollowness of Washington's claim that Iraqi democracy is now stable enough to justify the December 18 removal of the remaining U.S. combat troops. Mr. al-Hashimi has flown to the Kurdistan regional capital, Erbil, where he is relatively safe for the present. The national President, Jalal Talabani, and the Kurdish regional president, Masoud Barzani, have called for an immediate political conference. But the central government's issue of an arrest warrant for Mr. al-Hashimi, and the withdrawal from parliament of Ayad Allawi's secular-nationalist Iraqiya group, bring to an end a coalition that actually took 289 days to form after the March 2010 general election. The purported quiet of recent times, in which political violence has claimed 200-300 lives a month, has been shattered by a dozen bombings in Baghdad on December 22 that left 57 killed and 176 injured. Ominously, the attacks happened mainly in Shia-majority neighbourhoods, and could provoke sectarian retaliation.
Even temporary compromise will be very hard to achieve, not least because the Iraqi constitution itself institutionalises ethnic and sectarian divisions. The violence of the post-invasion years caused Shias and Sunnis to flee from mixed areas to regions with greater numbers of their own sect. That deepened mutual distrust and suspicion, which has been exacerbated by allegations that the Shia-dominated government is denying Sunni politicians ministerial posts or is obstructing those who hold them. Now three Sunni-majority provinces on the Syrian border are trying to form a self-governing region. Moreover, the U.S. abolition of civic bodies and the invaders' destruction of physical infrastructure, on the assumption that all who ran those were fanatical Saddamites, have done more than wreck the everyday functioning of Iraq. They have facilitated arbitrary and brutal policing and judicial practices, with trials conducted as much by confession as on the basis of evidence — a tactic Mr. al-Maliki is now using against his political adversaries. Now the country faces disintegration. That will only add to the terrible price millions of Iraqis have paid already, while the main invader, the United States, washes its hands of responsibility for either causing or preventing it.
