It seems nowadays Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket. I guess it's been like that for a while, but it seems to be getting progressively worse.
It's a perceptual problem. You see defeat perhaps because you want to see defeat. Well, if you wish hard enough, maybe it will happen.
Iraq's army was crushed in record time, the dictator was pulled out of a hole, and a series of very successful elections were held on schedule. As a result, Iraq has a government of Iraqis, by Iraqis, and for Iraqis. This was a tremendous accomplishment. The enthusiasm with which they took to voting was particularly promising (and in that respect somewhat more promising than the US). Does the formation of this new government mark the end of all their problems? Of course not. Nobody ever claimed that it would. As it turns out, there are some things which Iraqis will have to work out for themselves. The US can't do it for them. One of those things has to do with the balance between Shia and Sunna. It looks like they will have to fight that one out, which is what they are finally doing now, after putting it off for two years. The Sunnis ran the country before. Sunnis haven't all faced the fact yet that in a representative republic they won't run the country - they haven't the votes. So they tried the old Middle East destabilization routine - bombings, assassinations, petty atrocities galore. Now, however, it's come back to bite them, as Shias do the same to them. That is perhaps the reason why Moqtada was not imprisoned two years ago - he's the ideal tool to terrorize Sunnis. Both by inclination and by politics the US can't do it. But after Moqtada does his dirty work the government can neutralize him at its convenience, thus becomming the force which finally saves the Sunnis. A complication is that both factions are naturally terrified of the Kurds, who could massacre them all without difficulty (although the Kurds are Sunnis, that wouldn't slow them down much). The Iranian connection starts to become important because in a very real sense Moqtada is an Iranian agent. The Iranians are, of course, the Shi'ite center, for historical reasons I won't get into. But that's another reason why Moqtada will have to go, eventually. In the meantime, he's doing something useful.
Is this what's happening? I have no idea. This is elementry speculation. The point is that what you see as chaos may be chaos, or it may be something else. What I outlined is very simple, obvious stuff. I've ignored the Syrian and Turkish angles altogether. Obviously those complicate things further. "Complication" is not the same thing as "disaster".
Our problem is political. Two centuries ago, the Whigs in England considered it far more important to embarrass the Tory government of Lord North than to defend the Empire. Because of that, some North American colonies were able to split off. So we owe the existence of the United States to English politicians who couldn't see the big picture even when it was in front of their noses - or saw it but didn't care. Unfortunately the same thing is happening today. It's far more important to embarrass George Bush than it is to set up an outpost which can be used in the war against a political and religious movement which believes that planting bombs and machinegunning school children are just forms of political expression. And that is as shortsighted as anything done by Lord North's opponents.