Few ordinary Iraqis will be surprised that the violence in their country has now reached its most deadly level since 2008. In September alone around 1,000 people have died and 2,000 maimed in a spate of bomb attacks which are almost certainly the work of Al-Qaeda. Whatever their community, there will be a deep sense of despair that the government of Nouri Al-Maliki persists in its failure to take positive action to end the savagery. Indeed the Shia politician seems for all the world paralyzed with fear and indecision, like a rabbit caught in the headlamps on an oncoming truck. Many now wonder just how much longer it will be before Iraq descends into the tit-for-tat sectarian killings that brought the country to the brink of collapse in 2007. Yet Maliki might still find a way back from this looming disaster which is very much of his own making. His National Unity government that was finally put together in 2010 hardly ever looked particularly functional. Indeed dysfunction set in when at the end of 2011, Maliki condoned the issue of an arrest warrant for Tareq Al-Hashimi, the Sunni vice-president beneath Kurdish president Jalal Talabani. Hashimi left Iraq before he could be arrested. He was later convicted in absentia of leading Sunni death squads. Hashemi's guilt is still unclear. But what is completely understood is that within the government and parliament there are individuals from the Shia community who are widely known to have been involved in that inter-communal blood-letting. That there has been no move to prosecute these politicians has been seen by the Sunni community, as a sign that Hashimi's trial was political and part of an attempt to exclude Sunnis from the government. Sunni and Shia communities share a wider concern about the cohesion of Iraq. While the Maliki government and a bickering parliament pursue their incompetent ways, the Kurd-dominated northern part of the country is looking increasingly independent, as it displays ever greater contempt for instructions from Baghdad. The serious stroke that has caused Iraqi president Talabani to go to Germany for extended treatment, has removed the one brake on Iraqi Kurdish ambitions for independence. Indeed with the breakaway of Syrian Kurds as the Assad regime crumbles, and the peace deal between Turkey and its own Kurds, there is now every encouragement for Iraqi Kurdistan to go its own way. For Maliki to pull Iraq back from the brink of chaos and anarchy, requires a rapid and convincing political settlement, most importantly with the Sunni community. It is among the Sunnis that the bigots of Al-Qaeda are finding their support and it is the Sunni tribes who can crush the terrorists again, as they did in 2008. An end to the terrorist bombings will head off a return on inter-communal butchery. Moreover a properly functioning government will be able to address the myriad of inefficiencies and failures, not least in the health and education systems and the oil and gas sector. A genuine national unity government will also be able to confront Kurdish independence ambitions in the north and hopefully keep the country together. It is high time that Maliki began acting in the interests of Iraq and of all its people rather than his friends in Iran, who want nothing so much as a Iraq that is weak, divided and racked with violence.
