[continued from previous message] 
  
 lamented that the central government of Iraq might end up as a few buildings 
 in the Green Zone. 
  
 After the war in 2003, Arab Iraqis, both Sunni and Shia, would deride 
 comparisons between Iraq and countries divided by sectarianism such as 
 Northern Ireland and Lebanon. They pointed out that Sunni and Shia in Iraq 
 were often married to each other. They did not have a history of massacring 
 each other. These claims for Iraqi Arab solidarity were always a little 
 exaggerated. Sunni friends claim to love the Shia, aside, of course, "from 
 those that are really Iranians or their agents". The Shia, for their part, 
 said they saw all Iraqi Sunni as their brothers "aside from those that are 
 really Baathists". Claims of communal amity are made less often today. The 
 divisions between them are deepening because Iraq was a Sunni state and is 
 becoming a Shia one. The Sunni are fighting the US occupiers and the Shia 
 are, for the moment at least, loosely allied to the US. Iraq's al-Qa'ida 
 suicide bombers have repeatedly targeted Shia civilians such as day 
 labourers waiting for jobs in the Khadamiyah district of Baghdad. Would-be 
 army and police, almost always Shia, have been slaughtered again and again. 
  
 So far the Shia response has been restrained. Grand Ayatollah Ali 
 al-Sistani, the supreme religious leader who is vastly influential over the 
 Shia, has forbidden retaliation. But the powerful Ministry of the Interior, 
 once controlled by the Sunni, is now in the hands of the Shia. The minister, 
 Bayan Jabr, was previously a leader of SCIRI's militia, the Badr Brigade. 
  
 They dominate the fearsome paramilitary police commandos whom the Sunni see 
 as nothing more than licensed death squads. At the end of the year, US 
 troops raided an Interior Ministry bunker in the Jadriyah district of west 
 Baghdad, where they found 158 tortured and starved prisoners, all allegedly 
 Sunni. Bodies of men shot in the head and their hands in handcuffs are 
 routinely found on dumps and beside the road in Baghdad. 
  
 Many ministries have become the domain of a single sect or party. The health 
 ministry under the interim government became famous for being run by the 
 Dawa Shia Muslim group, while the transport ministry portfolio is held by a 
 follower of the nationalist cleric, Muqtada al- Sadr. This has a disastrous 
 impact because the government begins to resemble that of Lebanon. Ministers 
 are representatives of their communities. They cannot be fired, however 
 crooked or incompetent. 
  
 The impact of the insurgency is exaggerated because the state in Iraq 
 remains so weak. This remained strikingly true during 2005, when the 
 government did extraordinarily little for its people. The electricity supply 
 remains poor in Baghdad; kidnapping is rife; security is limited and Iraqis 
 spend much of their time surviving from day to day. The police are not seen 
 as protectors. Earlier this month, a student called Muammur Mohsin al-Obeidi 
 said: "The Iraqi people know nobody is going to save them from criminals. 
 They believe nobody will punish them. If gangsters are arrested they have 
 enough money to bribe their way out of prison. There is no real government." 
 It is a lament heard again and again from people in the streets of Baghdad. 
 They believe government scarcely exists - and certainly not for their 
 benefit. 
  
 There have been three administrations of Iraq since the US invasion, and all 
 have failed. There was the Coalition Provisional Authority, fairly undiluted 
 US imperial rule, under Paul Bremer, which helped provoke the Sunni 
 rebellion. On 28 June 2004, the US formally turned power over to the interim 
 government of Iyad Allawi, whose administration was notoriously corrupt. On 
 7 April 2005, Ibrahim al-Jaafari became Prime Minister but his government 
 has proved fractious. These divisions largely mirrored those between the 
 contending groups in Iraq. In all three administrations, corruption was on a 
 scale attributed to states like Nigeria in the past. In 2005 the entire 
 defence procurement budget of $1.3bn disappeared in return for a few 
 unusable helicopters and armoured vehicles. This degree of corruption is now 
 more difficult because ministers cannot spend money without authorisation. 
  
 There is a further reason why the Iraqi state is weak, which is not at first 
 obvious. The US and Britain foresaw an Iraqi state whose armed forces were 
 equipped only to cope with internal dissent. They have been determined not 
 to hand over heavy weapons or modern equipment. 
  
 The US has not been as generous in transferring power to Iraqis as might 
 appear from formal announcements. The main intelligence service has no 
 budget, but is paid for and run by the CIA. The US has tried to keep control 
 of the Defence Ministry and the new Iraqi army, which is supposedly being 
 built up to take the place of US forces when they are withdrawn. The US 
 military speaks of the triumphs and failures of training and equipping Iraqi 
 troops (they have given less attention to the police). But there is another 
 problem that the US has not really tackled. 
  
 The question is not just about the ability of the new army to fight, but 
 about loyalty. Who, at the end of the day, will the soldiers fight for? 
 Polls by Britain's Ministry of Defence show that the occupation is 
 overwhelmingly unpopular among Shia as well as Sunni Iraqis. In the long 
 run, the US cannot create an officer corps loyal to America. Then there is 
 also the question of how far the army is a national institution. Its 115 
 battalions are reportedly 60 Shia, 45 Sunni, 9 Kurdish and one mixed. Over 
 the next year we will see if Iraq is going to remain a single state or turn 
 into a confederation. There are forces for unity as well as disintegration. 
 Most Iraqi Arabs want to live in one country. But political observers fear 
 that a Bosnian solution is on the cards, in which Baghdad will play the role 
 of Sarajevo. 
  
  
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