The bombing of the Golden Mosque shrine in Samarra - a sacred site for Shia Muslims - is a dangerous provocation at a most sensitive time in the history of Iraq. Its political leaders are still engaged in negotiations about forming a coalition government after the December elections. This attack is presumably intended to make that more difficult by stoking up sectarian tension - and it may well have succeeded in doing so, given the response of several Shia leaders yesterday and the significant series of retaliatory attacks on Sunni mosques around Baghdad.
Violent resistance against occupation troops and Iraqi forces is increasing, largely from within the Sunni community and with a daily toll of horrifying intensity. This comes amid warnings from US and British representatives that greater efforts must be made to create a unitary government. This week, the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said they did not make the effort to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein and spend billions on the occupation only to see it succumb to Iranian interference, "providing arms and training the militias that are hostile to this new Iraq".
Shia leaders resent such pressure and the accompanying implication that they are too open to Iranian influence. Were a Shia-dominated government to emerge from these negotiations there would be a natural sympathy for Shia Iran.
This is precisely the outcome most feared by the Bush administration. It is increasingly focusing on a strategy of containing Iran's suspected objective of dominating the region, including its nuclear ambitions. If Iraq's new government is in fact dominated by Shias, a strategy intended to topple Saddam Hussein would end up facilitating Iran.
It would be a perverse outcome of the so-called war against terror which the Bush administration systematically but wrongly linked to the Saddam regime. It flows from the failure to prepare for Iraqi nation-building and for the insurgency that emerged, as Francis Fukuyama argues in this newspaper today. The mistaken assumption that the root cause of Middle East terrorism lies in the lack of democracy (which would be overcome by implanting it) looks hollow indeed when Islamist parties emerge as its strongest benficiaries, whether in Iraq, Palestine or Egypt.
It would be wrong to conclude that democracy is unsuitable for Iraq and other Arab or Muslim states, or that Iraq is inexorably heading for a civil war. Rather do Iraqis need to restore their self-rule and sovereignty through the withdrawal of occupying troops which continually provoke and reproduce military resistance and encourage it to take a sectarian form. That should be a central part of the agenda on forming a new government. Were the parties to insist on a phased withdrawal of foreign troops according to an agreed timetable it would help convince ordinary Iraqis that more can be achieved by politics than by violence.