Now here's a little NYT item that scarcely qualifies as news: "Iraq's political leaders have failed to reach agreements on nearly every law that the Americans have demanded as benchmarks.... The deadlock has reached a point where many Iraqi and American officials now question whether any substantive laws will pass before the end of the year."
Those dependable revelations are from the article's lead paragraph, and they're the most optimistic of the entire piece. Imagine the Bush administration's handling of Katrina and its immediate aftermath, then imagine that concentrated state of affairs extending unabated for four years, and you've then imagined Iraq's farcical political state of affairs yesterday, today, and, unless a new road is taken, for endless tomorrows.
For starters, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish politicians can't agree on how to split government booty; the splitting of which is a real trick in any event, since the Constitution they tacked together in 2005 to tremendous White House fanfare doesn't even "give the [central] government a right to collect taxes."
Nor can they agree on how to divorce federal custodies and obligations from the regional, or the regional from the federal, or any sound and lasting compromise in between. "The future," as just one example, "of oil-rich Kirkuk [has been] left in limbo."
A related problem is that Kirkuk, of course, is where a lot of Kurds live, who, of course, aren't Arabs, but live in an Arab country, or at least we think it's an Arab country. But there were "bitter disputes over whether the Constitution should define Iraq as an Arab country," which perhaps to us seems neither necessary or even advisable, but which straightaway tips one off that there's something not only ethnically but irremediably rotten in Denmark.
And, our good friend and colossal fraud Ahmad Chalabi is still at it, sewing discord, discontent and dissension at every turn. The Bush administration, having thoroughly balled things up by de-Baathing Iraq, decided re-Baathing things might be smart, but Chalabi "sabotaged the American-backed plan by rallying opposition among Shiite government officials in southern Iraq."
Mr. Chalabi also got Grand Ayatollah Aki al-Sistani all riled up about it, and that, as they say, was that.
Once they're good and disgusted with the way things are, Iraqis might want to consider just putting Chalabi in dictatorial charge of the whole shooting match, because anyone with his exponential Power of Sleaze who can evade a prison cell this long has earned a shot at banana-republic stardom.
The article's itemization of internal problems goes on, and on. But earlier this week Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki sharply summarized his "country's" state of affairs: "There are two mentalities in this region, conspiracy and mistrust."
If that were likely to change it would have changed by now. That it hasn't leads one to conclude that Iraq's various efforts at sorting things out should be narrowed to only one: achieving partition. Such is the one remedial elephant in the living room, and at least it would come with a new circus in town.