US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has endorsed a pause in the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in spite of opposition from the Pentagon. The temporary halt for evaluation will take place at the end of July after the departure of five brigades, retaining 15 brigades, the number deployed before 30,000 additional soldiers joined the “surge” pacification campaign. The Pentagon argues that the military is over-stretched and the morale of soldiers is flagging due to long deployments in Iraq.

Gates took this decision this week after consultations in Baghdad with US commander General David Petraeus, who argues that gains over the past year could be lost if the troops leave before Iraq’s security forces are able to impose order.

Iraq is fragile, its future uncertain. On the security front, bombers have staged a number of dramatic attacks.
Sunni volunteers belonging to the US-funded “Sons of Iraq” movement are demanding recognition and jobs from the Shia-led government. Several thousand Sunni fighters in Dyala governorate are on strike. Checkpoints have been abandoned; operations against al-Qaeda are on hold. The strikers call for dismissal of a provincial police chief accused of heading a death squad responsible for the kidnapping and murder of two Sunni women.

In Anbar, a Sunni-majority province, the “Sons of Iraq” are also demanding posts in the police and army. But the Shia-led government has inducted only a few hundred of the US-recruited 70,000 Sunni volunteers whose efforts have made a major contribution to the success of the “surge” in Anbar, Dyala and other areas. Sunni fighters and leaders are angry because they have become chief targets of al-Qaeda. Some 130 have died in the past few weeks.

A further destabilising factor is a revolt by Mahdi Army militia commanders against the ceasefire imposed by their chief, radical Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.

The situation is also “fragile” on the political front even though on Wednesday parliament finally passed the $48 billion 2008 budget, an amnesty which could lead to the release of thousands of prisoners, and legislation defining the powers of provinces vis-a-vis Baghdad and preparing the way for provincial elections. This ended months of wrangling, ended calls for the dissolution of the assembly, and gave a boost to the weak government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki which was facing a no-confidence vote.

But the adoption of these measures came as a result of a trade-off and was passed by a single vote because the parties could not trust each other to pass the measures separately. It remains to be seen whether a large number of the 26,000 prisoners in Iraqi jails, the majority Sunnis, will be freed and provincial elections held.
Parliament is still under pressure to pass two other major pieces of legislation demanded by the Kurds. They insist on a referendum to decide whether the oil producing region around Kirkuk should be annexed by the Kurdish autonomous region and on acceptance of unilateral Kurdish agreements with foreign firms for oil exploitation in the Kurdish region. Both these measures are flatly rejected by Arab Iraqis and could lead to Arab-Kurdish conflict.

The assembly passed the three measures because it had no choice.  Failure to do so meant either fresh elections or the collapse of the Maliki government.  The factions chose to retain current power-sharing arrangements and remain in office in order to reap communal and personal advantages, not to rebuild the state the US wrecked when it toppled the Baathist regime in 2003.