And Then, What?

Events in Iraq, we're informed, have turned around. Yes, there remain suicide attacks, with horrible consequences. But, we're reminded, nothing like what the situation was like a few years earlier.

Basically it would appear that the U.S. administration is crowing that their "troop surge" was incredibly successful in rooting out al-Qaeda in Iraq nests of Sunni terrorists, and in persuading the indigent Sunni tribal groups that it would be in their best interests to defy and defeat al-Qaeda.

As most surely it was, since al-Qaeda in Iraq seemed to make no nice distinctions between the Shia and the Sunni populations in Iraq, targeting them all equally, brutally, bloodily. Earning them no conscripts from within the country, it would appear. Relying heavily on bringing in foreign jihadists from surrounding countries eager to try their hand at the combination of martyrdom-and-murder.

Oh yes, and there's also that little parenthetical reality that Sunni and Shia factions and their militias appear to have clapped out, no longer roaming neighbourhoods targeting each other's sectarian enclaves, indulging in sectarian cleansing. Some of that continues, but haphazardly, no longer a prime focus with scores of bodies being found at daybreak.

The charnel house that was Baghdad has been tamed.

Neighbourhoods have now neatly been transformed into Sunni or Shia. Those who weren't slaughtered, picked up their belongings and their dependents and moved onward, to take up new residence, in homogeneous enclaves of one or the other. And life saw some light on the horizon, and markets re-opened and people relaxed their life-and-death vigilance.

Oops, now comes the restlessness of the greatly feared Mehdi Army. Clamouring for a renewal of their jihad against the fiercely detested presence of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq. The six-month ceasefire declared by Moqtada al-Sadr is coming to an end; his militias are restive, they await their leader's verdict.

So what will it be?