Anyone who thinks the United States has stabilized Iraq has absolutely no understanding of Middle East tribal culture. When the United States finally pulls out of Iraq, that country will dissolve into its three main tribal fiefdoms (Kurdistan, Sunnistan, and Shi'astan), and thank God for that! Iraq in its current configuration is an "artificial nation" whose national boundaries were imposed by Great Britain around 1918 and is INTRINSICALLY unstable because Arabs are tribally oriented and have no sense of the nation-state, nor do they want to. There's a reason why Saddam Hussein was a brutal, secular dictator: it was the only way to keep the nation together. As soon as we removed that stabilizing force, the nation predictably dissolved into civil war (as a massive 1999 US military war-game predicted would happen, even were we to occupy the nation with 500,000 troops). Hussein may have been an evil man, but he was undeniably the right man for the job -- assuming it's a good thing to keep Iraq together at all, which I personally don't believe.
The only reason why the Sunnis had favored continued American occupation was they were were terrified they'd be cut off from oil supplies should the nation be split into three states (the Kurdish north and Shi'a south have oil, but until recently, the Sunni central region had none). Now that a potentially lucrative oil field has been discovered in central Iraq, look for Sunni support of nationhood to dissolve steadily.
From the beginning of the occupation, the national government has been largely a figurehead, with most of the power residing in the provincial governments. Twenty years from now, look for "Iraq" (if the name exists at all) to be at most a nominally federal entity -- the Confederation of Iraqi States, if you will. But the real power will reside within the tribal units.
"Nonstopdrivel" wrote: