The Iraq war may seem to be winding down, but Iraqis are still a long way from celebrating their independence. In fact, there's now a quiet war of assassination occurring against political leaders of the Sunni minority that appears to fit the frequent pre-war warnings which cautioned that the United States would not be able to leave Iraq with a stable democracy.
Since Iraq's parliamentary elections took place in March, the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been unable to build a governing coalition with other minority parties. One reason is that Mr. Maliki's Shiite-based party and potential partners remain locked in a struggle for power with Iraqiya, an umbrella party that won most of the seats in the election. The party's more independent appeal drew in Sunnis, members of the Awakening Councils that opposed Al Qaida-provoked terrorism, secular Shiites and various minority groups who oppose, or feel frozen out of, Baghdad's Shiite power circles.
The electoral mechanics are not surprising. Though Mr. Maliki's power base is largely the Shiite community, which represents nearly 60 percent of Iraq's population, Shiites splintered into several rival parties, weakening the prime minister's influence.
At the same time, members of Iraqiya, called Iraqiyun, managed to cobble together a broad mix of voters: Some remain loyal to the old Baathist party principles, some resent the influence of Shiite Iran in Baghdad, or the corruption or distance they see in the Maliki government.
Though it remains officially unexplained, the rate of assassinations of Iraqiyun politicians, tribal chiefs, civil servants, Sunni clerics, police officers and Awakening Council members, has soared since the March elections. More than 150 have been killed, The New York Times reported last Thursday. Iraqiyun officials, The Times found, are fleeing their offices, jobs and homes and going into hiding. Some new members of Parliament are staying in a heavily secured hotel in Baghdad.
There are theories about the rash of killings that do not lay the blame on Shiites, to be sure. One suggests that an al Qaida cell might be killing Iraqiya leaders as a payback for Sunni Awakening members who finally turned against the deadly savagery of al Qaida's senseless suicide bombings and helped suppress its random slaughter.
Another theory alleges Iranian meddling to eliminate leaders who oppose Iran's expanding influence in Baghdad. A notion in the northerly provinces of Mosul and Nineveh, home to many Kurds, posits that Kurds are trying to run off Sunni Arabs, especially political leaders, so they can integrate more of the north into an autonomous Kurdish zone.
Most Sunnis and secular Shiites, however, apparently believe that the prime minister's government has unleashed the Shiite-dominated Army against Iraqiyun to push them out of the political process and secure a de facto coup of the government for the majority Shiite.
That remains the most plausible explanation. The Sunnis brutally suppressed the Shiites and Kurds for decades under Saddam Hussein, and the war of the past seven years has been mostly about which side would come out on top in the end.
It was unlikely that the United States could ever fundamentally alter that dynamic, no matter what war-starter George W. Bush said. The critical wisdom has always been that whenever the United States left the fighting, Sunnis and Shiites would settle their old scores on their own terms in an inescapable end-game. If that time is here, it would not be unexpected.