No matter the promises made by the Democrats, who secured a House majority in last year’s elections, little progress has been made with regards to seriously addressing the conflict in Iraq. Of course, legislation has been tabled and passed by both Houses and vetoed by the President, but many have become disenfranchised with the Democrat’s inability to make real progress. Given the scandals that have plagued the Bush administration, there has also been little action with regards to addressing the issue of impeachment as a way forward, which is not as far fetched as many might believe, though unrealistic in that most politicians fear entering into such proceedings given the ‘state of war’ in which the United States finds itself and how it might effect their political futures.

The reality of Iraq with regards to those attempting to secure the Democratic Presidential nomination is that most realize that truly actionable promises can’t be made because they are, for the most part, unfeasible. The hole that has been dug is too deep to address with any force of principle without abandoning the centrist thinking that many of the candidates are banking on to get them elected. Thus, to take the sort of bold action necessary to disengage the United States may very well be tantamount to political suicide. This is evident when the positions of many of the front-runners are examined. All of them have no realistic strategy for actually disengaging the United States from Iraq, only initiatives that slightly bend its purpose to create the appearance of change.

Even those with forward thinking initiatives, such as Senators Biden, Richardson, and Congressman Kucinich, are trapped within the creation of a reality that the current administration took little time to consider – Iraq’s polarized history. While theirs are perhaps the most assertive proposals, it is impossible to simply disregard Iraq’s centuries of autocratic rule under the Ottomans as three distinct provinces. Despite the fact that the country has existed in its current state since the end of the First World War, it cannot be overlooked that the decades since have been ones of both turmoil coupled with the continued autocratic rule of various entities, from monarchs to dictators that have only been able to secure tenuous peace through wholly undemocratic means precisely because of the nation’s underlying ethnic tensions.

A tyrant without question, Saddam Hussein was one such individual who was able to defuse such tensions, though through obviously questionable means. But it cannot be said that his wasn’t a technique that succeeded in bottling the tempest. Therein lies the difference in the understanding of Iraq itself, that a despot such as Hussein understood the complexities of its fragile and volatile state far better than those that invaded and occupied the country in 2003. The deliverance of democracy aside, the invasion’s quintessential mistake was not taking into consideration the underlying, and very real, divisions within Iraqi society. And so the United States finds itself on the flip side of a century of uneasy ethnic calm waiting for even the slightest chance for redress between the nation’s three primary ethnic groups.

In Northern Iraq the Turks have been threatening military overtures towards the Kurds, or at least Kurdish separatists that have worked for decades to unite those lands populated by that ethnicity. In the south, it is not lost on the nation’s Shia majority that their numbers are far greater than those of the Sunnis, both of whom are ideologically backed by various other countries, from Saudi Arabia to Iran. Thus, it is in the middle, in and around Iraq’s troubled capital, that this historic powder keg may very well fully explode, making the violence that has been seen so far negligible in comparison.

To some, the arming and funding of Sunni militant groups by the United States might be seen as a maneuver to combat Salafi Jihadis, which is precisely how it’s been sold, but there is surely something deeper to their designs that ultimately have to do with concerns that Shia majority governments may very well become commonplace in the new Iraq. Being that the United States has, for some time, asserted that Iranian influence is prevalent in such quarters, and given their obvious disdain for Iran, it only stands to reason that such a move may also be designed to bolster the military capabilities of the Sunnis while under a watchful eye so that they might feel more secure with regards to adhering to the political process. And while that might smack of lunacy to some, it is certainly a very palpable reality as far as the Iraqi political process is concerned. Strength equals the perception of political power, especially in nations that have long histories of violence and no experience with the democratic process whatsoever.

That is the landscape that Mr. Bush has uncovered, and in doing so trapped his successor, whomever that may be, in a painted corner, and whose only option may very well be to wait for the paint to dry.