The Fleeting Success of the Surge

Not that all the Sunni fighters want to join the Iraqi army or police. Many regard al-Maliki's government as a puppet of Iran--as loathsome as al-Qaeda or more so. In some Sunni neighborhoods, former insurgents who patrol the streets alongside U.S. troops regard the Iraqi forces as the enemy. When the Americans leave, they expect to be fighting against government forces. Abu Abid, a former insurgent who now helps guard the Amiriya neighborhood, has no illusions about how things will pan out. "After [we] defeat al-Qaeda, the government will come after me," he says. "The government, they hate us. They don't want to reconcile with us."

Al-Maliki is also openly contemptuous of the Sunni political class, which he views as weakened because it can no longer use the threat of violence as leverage in negotiations. "The terror arm is not working for them, and their political influence is becoming insignificant," an adviser to the Prime Minister told TIME. So al-Maliki has been able to run roughshod over the Sunnis in his notionally all-party government. Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the government's highest-ranking Sunni, frequently complains that he doesn't get a fair hearing. "[Al-Hashimi] is losing a lot of ground," the adviser said. Al-Maliki's Shi'ite inner circle tends to see the marginalization of Sunni politicians as a victory, but it only confirms to many Sunnis that the government is unlikely to give them any share in power.

Crooked State, Crippled Services

While politicians in the protected bubble of the Green Zone argue in circles, rampant graft has left Iraq devoid of any meaningful governance. Transparency International, which monitors corruption worldwide, recently ranked Iraq as the third most corrupt country in the world, ahead of only Burma and Somalia. This fall the government's top anticorruption official sought asylum in the U.S. for fear of assassination; 31 of his employees have been killed in the past three years. Before leaving Iraq, Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi estimated that $18 billion in government money had disappeared since 2004. In October he told a congressional hearing in Washington that corruption has affected "virtually every agency and ministry, including some of the most powerful officials in Iraq." Much of the missing money was meant for infrastructure projects and the improvement of basic services. Without that vital investment, Baghdad remains chronically short of electricity, water and gasoline. There are no reliable economic data, but the unemployment rate is thought to be nearly 50%.

Al-Maliki routinely promises to clean up his government, but his tendency to blame the corruption on Saddam Hussein suggests a reluctance to confront unpleasant realities. Al-Maliki has decreed that his office must be consulted before investigators can pursue top officials, and he uses a Saddam-era law to exempt some officials from investigation, prompting suspicions that he is shielding crooked political allies. At the congressional hearing, al-Radhi named the Prime Minister's cousin, former Transport Minister Salam al-Maliki, as a top official who had been protected from investigation.

There's No Political Leadership

In a year and a half in office, Al-Maliki has proved incapable of rising above narrow Shi'ite politics. He has tended to hector and provoke rivals rather than attempt any genuine reconciliation. Last month he told a widely read Arabic paper that al-Hashimi's bloc in Parliament, the larger of two Sunni groupings, didn't represent Iraq's Sunnis. "This is not how you treat your allies in a government of national unity," says Maysoon al-Damaluji, one of the Parliament's handful of secular members. Nor is the Prime Minister the only partisan in the Green Zone. Sunni leaders have frequently been linked to terrorists. Last month a car bomb was found near the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, who heads al-Hashimi's bloc; several of his bodyguards were arrested. Al-Dulaimi was not accused of wrongdoing but admitted he couldn't vouch for his bodyguards. Kurdish leaders tend to look after the interests of Kurdistan first rather than of the nation as a whole.

U.S. officials spend a lot of time coaxing and cajoling the Iraqi leadership to show some statesmanship. So far, it hasn't worked. "There isn't a common vision of what Iraq should be--in the near future or the far future," says al-Damaluji. Nowhere is that clearer than in Parliament, where sectarian and ethnic bickering passes for political dialogue. This time last year, American officials were pressing Iraqi politicians to set aside their differences and pass several crucial pieces of legislation--among them a deal on sharing oil revenues, a referendum on the status of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk and a law allowing members of Saddam's Baath Party to return to government jobs. The Bush Administration has since abandoned many of those benchmarks, focusing on less ambitious goals, like getting Parliament to pass the annual budget and generally work toward national reconciliation.

But the Iraqi Parliament continues to put off key issues. The status of Kirkuk--claimed by Kurds, Arabs and a third ethnic group known as Turkomans--was meant to be decided by the end of this year. Iraqi and U.S. officials now say that vote will have to be postponed. Ditto the vote on the budget. Bills on oil revenues and the drawing of provincial borders are no closer to being passed than they were months ago. The worry now is that if key political battles take place after the Americans have drawn down forces, they could spill into the streets in a confrontation between warring militias.

For Iraqi refugees like the Awadis, all this paints a dismal picture. Adnan and Noora say they and other refugee friends in Amman start almost every conversation with the question, Should we go home now? But the conversations all end the same way. "We want to be optimistic, but in the end we have to face reality," says Noora. "It is not time to pack our bags."