Smoke Signals

Quoted from Stratfor's early August analysis of the Iraqi situation.

Normally, when a country faces a rebellion against its prime minister, the formation of a de facto separatist government, the threat of invasion and resignation of its military chief -- simultaneously, no less -- Stratfor considers it a failed state. But Iraq is a bit of a different animal (and has been a failed state for years) so our assessment is different.

Believe it or not, all of this is actually good news.

Iraq's future is not going to be settled by Iraq's various Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish factions unless outside actors choose to empower them (and even that would be no small task). The locals are all too weak, too fractured and too fratricidal to be able to establish internal control without a huge amount of outside help -- and this assessment extends to the "national" government of al-Maliki as well.

Which means that "progress" -- such as it is in Iraq -- is now not only largely out of the hands of the Iraqis, but also largely outside of Iraq itself. The country's future can no longer be ascertained by reading the local smoke signals, but only by looking at the wider region. It is not so important that some southern Iraq Shia are threatening to break away, but it is critical that the United States is dumping a few tens of billion of dollars in weapons on the region's Sunni states in order to ensure their agreement in Iraq. It is now a side note that the Kurds might shelter Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels from Turkey, and far more critical that Washington might give Ankara a green light to invade northern Iraq to root out the PKK in order to demonstrate to Iran that the United States still has some cards to play.