Your regularly scheduled disaster, updated

I noted on Sunday that Reuters was reporting the Shiites and Kurds in the Iraqi assembly had cut a deal about top government offices: Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, was to be president while Ibrahim Jaafari, a Shiite, would become prime minister. Vice-presidents would be Shiite Adel Abdul Mahdi and a Sunni-to-be-named-later.

Thursday's Christian Science Monitor shows that the report was spot on, with Ghazi al-Yawer, president of the interim government, taking up that final slot. But it also turns out that despite happy talk about the various factions "learning to compromise" and being "past logjams," I am by no means alone in my concern about the future. For example, Phebe Marr, an Iraq specialist at the US Institute of Peace, noted

how the debate has resulted in pushing off what she calls Iraq's "existential issues" to later resolution.

And remember, all this arguing and wrangling and negotiating and positioning was for posts in a government that is only supposed to last until the end of the year, to then be replaced by a government newly-elected under the new constitution - the one the assembly is supposed to have drafted by August 15,

unless lawmakers ask for a six-month extension, which many Iraqi leaders are hinting is increasingly likely.

"If it took them this long to choose leaders with an uncomplicated majority in parliament, it seems wishful thinking that they could finish up on time on the constitution," says [former State Department Iraq analyst Henri] Barkey. "It takes up much more fundamental issues."

Barkey says the "most prickly" of those fundamental (or "existential") issues include the role of religion in governing Iraq and

the setting of internal boundaries of the new Iraqi federation. That refers primarily to the boundaries of the Kurdistan region, where the northern city of Kirkuk will fall in the new demarcation, and therefore how Iraq's northern oil revenues will be divided.

That's pretty much the same as I said on Sunday, with the addendum of something Barkey brushes against but doesn't lay out: just how tight or loose a federation this is going to be, with Shiites pulling the former way and Kurds the latter.

Meanwhile,

[b]asic services like electricity are still shoddy and many ministries have been unable to carry out the most basic functions for weeks, like renewing driver's licenses.

By the way, another article in the same edition of CSM accidentally confirms my suspicions about the supposed "calming down" of the insurgency based on a drop in the number of daily attacks.

Attacks on US forces have dropped 22 percent since the Jan. 30 election, to about 40 a day, about the rate they were a year ago.

Three things here: One, the drop is being compared to the period leading up to the election, a time when, just as everyone predicted, there was a sharp increase in insurgent attacks. Two, the figure only refers to attacks on US forces - even though, as I said at least as early as December, attacks on Iraqi military and civilian targets are an increasing part of the insurgency. But apparently such attacks don't count, because US military officials admit "they don't keep exact figures." Three, the "calmed down" figures are where they were a year ago.

This is what is being represented as progress.

But in one important sense it doesn't matter, because measuring the insurgency by counting attacks is an entirely bogus undertaking.

Saturday's well-organized attack on Abu Ghraib prison, in which 40 US troops and 12 prisoners were injured, suggests that fighters may be shifting to fewer but better executed operations, including ones that directly engage US forces. ...

[T]he insurgency's trends indicate that even at an average pace, the tough guerrilla warfare seen today is likely to continue for many years. "Don't expect solutions now. We're two years into this," [Col. Thomas X.] Hammes[, an insurgency expert at the National Defense University in Washington,] says. "We're at the top of the third inning and this is a nine-inning game." ...

Overall, analysts point to what seems like a classic insurgency, one that is expected to increase in sophistication by learning from past mistakes and less capable fighters are killed off.

American forces have been responding like a typical conventional force, slowly recognizing the insurgency and gradually bringing in leaders and drawing up plans that can deal with it effectively.

All that usually takes about 10 years to end the fighting, according to Hammes.

That'll work out fine: By the 10th anniversary of the war, with the scores of billions being squandered on this madness, I expect the US will be in need a good tin cup to do some begging.