The “surge” will end sooner or later, and the Iraqis, crippled by violence and corruption, will still be incapable of uniting their polity, and, with their military still unable to take over from the Americans, jihadi and inter-ethnic violence is bound to erupt again. As Iraqi Colonel Omar Ali, the Iraqi battalion commander in Mosul, the main focus of the insurgency today, recently put it, “Without the Americans, it would be impossible for us to control Iraq.”