The year is ending not with a successful US withdrawal from Iraq — as President
Barack Obama claims — but with what amounts to a coup d’etat by the country’s Shiite prime minister (and former ally of the US) Nouri al-Maliki. Less than 24 hours after the last US soldier
left Iraq, the country’s Sunni vice-president Tareq al-Hashemi was wanted on charges that he led death squads, in a case most
observers think could reignite the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07.
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Violence in Iraq has subsided since 2006-07, when Sunni insurgents and Shiite militiamen killed thousands of civilians each month — but, without U.S. troops to act as a buffer, many Iraqis now fear a return to those days. Al-Iraqiya, the mostly Sunni-backed political bloc, has boycotted parliament and the cabinet in protest at Maliki’s power grab.
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