Sunnis in Iraq deal not only with the violence perpetrated by Shia death sqauds, but also the day to day living difficulties associated with being in the minority and out of power.  In Baghdad, the search for ice has become a deadly struggle.

Each day before the midsummer sun rises high enough to bake blood on concrete, Baghdad’s underclass lines up outside Dickensian ice factories.

With electricity reaching most homes for just a couple of hours each day, the poor hand over soiled brown dinars for what has become a symbol of Iraq’s steady descent into a more primitive era and its broken covenant with leaders, domestic and foreign. In a capital that was once the seat of the Islamic Caliphate and a center of Arab worldliness, ice is now a currency of last resort for the poor, subject to sectarian horrors and gangland rules.

In Shiite-majority Topci, icemakers say that Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army militia issued a diktat on the first day of summer ordering vendors to set a price ceiling of 4,000 dinars, or $3, per 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, block of ice – 30 percent less than they charge in areas outside Mahdi army control.

Everyone complied, delivering an instant subsidy to the veiled women and poor laborers who are the radical Shiite cleric’s natural constituency. The same price is enforced in his other power bases, like Sadr City.

Some suppliers are horrified.

“They are trying to improve their image, and gain favor,” grumbled one merchant, as a sickle-wielding colleague chopped the hollow crystalline blocks in half for black-robed women to cram into shopping bags. “But it won’t do much good. We all know what the Mahdi army are.”

We have repeatedly called for the disappearance of Moqtada al Sadr from the political and military scene in Iraq, as has Omar Fadhil of Iraq The Model, who observed that “While Al-Qaeda poses a serious security challenge in some provinces, Sadr threatens the future of the whole country. He can paralyze or disrupt the proper functioning of whole ministries and provinces.”  But it appears that Sadr will remain unmolested, and perhaps for good reason (in Maliki’s eyes).  Maliki’s party remains secretive, suspicious, and obsessesed with survival.

As the U.S. military attempts to pacify Iraq so its leaders can pursue political reconciliation, Iraqi and Western observers say Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his inner circle appear increasingly unable to pull the government out of its paralysis.

At times consumed by conspiracy theories, Maliki and his Dawa party elite operate much as they did when they plotted to overthrow Saddam Hussein — covertly and concerned more about their community’s survival than with building consensus among Iraq’s warring groups, say Iraqi politicians and analysts and Western diplomats.

In recent weeks, those suspicions have deepened as U.S. military commanders have begun to work with Sunni insurgents, longtime foes of the Shiite-led government, who have agreed to battle the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

“The level of mutual trust is so low that you really have to not just rebuild trust, you have to build trust in the first place, and that is still very much a work in progress right now,” said Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the top U.N. envoy to Iraq.

The prime minister’s close aides counter that Maliki can lead and that party leaders are committed to building a broad-based government.

“The Dawa party has no special request that Maliki must listen to us,” said Hassan Suneid, a Dawa legislator and close adviser to the prime minister. “We do not want to impose a government different than what everybody else wants. Trust me, the Dawa party is the one who pushes Maliki to be open-minded to other voices.”

There are many reasons for Iraq’s political stagnation. In the fifth year of war, Iraq’s politicians remain more loyal to their sect, clan, tribe and region than they are to the nation. A culture of fear, inherited from Hussein’s reign, remains entrenched.

“Some of the coterie of Maliki fear their friends more than they fear their enemies,” said Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite who heads Iraq’s Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification. “You can’t separate people from their backgrounds. Most of them were used to secret-society politics, not open politics.”

A moderately different take on this might be that Maliki and his party distrusts, and because of this doesn’t want a strong central government or institutions to develop.  It is seen as contrary to his own survival.

Not surprisingly, insurgencies have become a topic of considerable interest among military analysts, with experts studying the life cycles of insurgencies around the world. In that work, they’ve found that as an insurgency matures, the motivation of its leaders often changes. Rebels who start out fighting for what they see as a noble cause or to achieve a goal in time come to enjoy the power and money that insurgency brings them. Analysts describe that transition as “grievance to greed.”

In a new paper, Steven Metz, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, makes a point with considerable relevance to Iraq. He argues that government leaders fighting an insurgency undergo that same transformation. They too find the insurgency a convenient way to accumulate power and money, and they don’t really mind if it continues. In their world, the considerable personal risks they would have to take to make peace vastly outweigh the minor risks of letting the insurgency continue.

For example, Metz points out, building an effective military is essential if a government is to defeat an insurgency. Yet government leaders also understand that a powerful military can also become a threat to their own existence. As Metz notes, “more regimes have been overthrown by coups than by insurgencies.” Government leaders are more secure with a weak military and continuing insurgency than with a strong military and no insurgency.

Then there is another view.  The always interesting and compelling Nibras Kazimi calls the Sunni withdrawal from the government a miscalculation, and points to the hardship of learning democratic politics as the root cause of the problems.  After dealing with a significant amount of detail on the personalities and political machinations involved, he concludes:

Maliki may be secure for now in the fact that no one can agree on his replacement in such a confused, yet healthy, atmosphere of political jockeying. The sectarian-based coalitions that emerged from the last elections are breaking down as the threat of sectarian warfare diminishes further and further, and the Sunni insurgency grinds down to an allowable baseline of violence. But Maliki must act quickly and confidently to put his own stamp on a new cabinet of his own choosing, something that many doubt that he has the personal stamina and brain-power to do.

For now, it’s great for me to watch the Islamist parties fumble, with no dominant ‘leader’ emerging. Everyone is being forced to play politics within the rules of the game; no more military coups, no more ‘Great Leaders’. The Sadrists have shown themselves to be as inept and corrupt as all the rest, and the shrill Sunni voices are being supplanted by new political forces that can live with the huge cascade of change begun on April 9, 2003.

But Iraqis are still suffering from the ineptness of their public servants, and new and empowered managerial talent must be harnessed to improve basic services and revive the economy, and it’s immoral to keep Iraqis waiting much longer.

The best case scenario would be early parliamentary elections in six months, with Maliki acting as a care-taker. But all the parties understand that this may greatly diminish their gains and will work to prevent it from happening; the Shiites will probably be unable to depend on a blessing from Grand Ayatollah Sistani this time around given their poor performance in power. An even-better scenario would be to turn parliamentary seats into district representations rather than slate-backed, but again, the current lack-lustre MPs would refuse that.

Congressional critics and the western media may want to play up this political confusion as a sign that Bush is not making progress in Iraq, and they predictably will. But a fairer analysis would conclude that these are all healthy signs of the re-introduction of politics into Iraqi life. It may not even be as pretty as sausage-making, yet it puts to rest the Middle Eastern instinctual impulse for a short-cut to power through violence and tyranny.

These are two radically different views of the events transpiring before our eyes.  From politics to the daily needs of ice to prevent food from spoiling, every element of Iraqi society is in a struggle.  Is this a struggle to prevent a strong central government from developing and keep a party in power, or is this a picture of the reintroduction of politics into a society which hasn’t seen it in decades?  Which view is correct will become apparent in good time.