The Petraeus-Crocker Show: Best Song and Dance Team to Hit Washington in Years

With the head of the occupying forces in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker delivering a progress report to Congress this week, Iraq has been thrust back into the U.S. public consciousness, along with all the political divisions the issue engenders.

What the George W. Bush administration hails as a "success" has indeed yielded a marked drop in violence, with civilian deaths down by half. However, the U.S. occupation's larger counter-insurgency strategy -- often identified as the "surge" but going well beyond the escalated troops numbers that refers to -- fails to address the very Iraqi political reconciliation it is meant to bring about, many observers say.

The myth of the "calm" -- a scant 600 innocent lives ended violently in a month -- in Iraq was shattered two weeks ago when an intra-Shia power struggle turned bloody, exposing Bush's strategy as a mere band-aid covering up the festering wounds of Iraqi societal strife.

"That's essentially where we are right now. Violence is down on the surface, but a lot is boiling underneath," Michael Ware, a correspondent for CNN who reports extensively from inside Iraq, said at a forum on Iraq at the Centre for American Progress last week.

While Bush claims that his Iraq policy is not beholden to public opinion polls in the U.S., it is increasingly difficult to view the respective aspects of the U.S. strategy as doing anything more than reducing violence now to quell domestic dissent against the war at the cost of deferring further strife until a new administration takes power in Washington next January -- giving Bush political cover to disown more widespread fighting that could destabilise what little order has been imposed since the aftermath of Iraq's invasion in 2003.

The recent violence, when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered Iraqi troops to confront factions of anti-U.S. Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia with U.S. air support, in fact reveals further divides and puts on ready display the dissolution of what was a delicately and loosely unified Shia political bloc.

While the control of the so-called "special groups" of the Mahdi Army assaulted by the national government are considered by Petraeus and the administration to be rogue, criminal elements of the cleric's militia, the large-scale operations are a sign of factionalised Shia infighting between Maliki and Sadr -- evidenced by the fact that negotiations, through the Iranians, between Sadr and envoys of the two ruling-coalition Shia parties, including Maliki's Dawa party, finally brought the hostilities to an end.

But Shia power struggles are the lesser of the buried sectarian tensions that loom large over the future of a peaceful Iraq. Head-butting persists between the ruling majority Shia sect and Sunni groups being brought into the fold by the U.S. army, which are perhaps the most delicate arrangements of the surge strategy -- and amongst the most important in reducing the levels of violence.

The Sunni insurgency, former supporters of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, had initially resisted U.S. occupation by any means necessary, including an alliance with al Qaeda in Iraq. They initially feared that the previously oppressed Shia majority would vanquish them once empowered by the U.S., and so boycotted initial elections.

A dialogue with the U.S. in 2004 fell apart because the Sunnis refused to deal with the Shia-dominated national government. As the Sunnis apparently became fed up with al Qaeda creating difficult situations in their territories, and unable to combat that group, Shia militias, and the U.S. concurrently, they formed groups called Sahwa -- or awakening in Arabic -- which were then approached by the U.S. to become part of its surge.