This is not helpful:
Troops from Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan opened fire on an Iraqi army helicopter on Tuesday, underscoring tensions between Baghdad's Arab-led central government and the Kurdish region, officials said.
They were warning shots rather than attempts to hit the aircraft. But it raises the tensions.
And tensions do exist:
Iraq's transition to a world without American boots on the ground has been rocky.
Political crisis gripped the country as soon as U.S. troops left, when the Iraqi government announced an arrest warrant against Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, one of the country's highest-ranking Sunni politicians. Al-Hashemi is accused of orchestrating death squads — a charge he dismisses as politically motivated. Iraqi courts have since found him guilty in absentia and handed down multiple death sentences against him. ...
Ethnic tensions, meanwhile, are bubbling back to the surface. The Kurds, a different ethnic group from Iraq's majority Arabs, last month sent additional troops to fortify their positions in disputed areas bordering the Kurds' largely autonomous northern enclave.
These crises and tensions existed with our troops in Iraq, but our troops gave everyone some confidence that other factions couldn't use force to get what they wanted. Without our physical presence, the threshold of force is lower.
And let's not even go into whether we'd have fewer problems in Syria if American aircraft patrolled Iraq's skies to prevent Iranian flights into Syria providing support to Assad.
We still have much influence, but it is less than what we'd have with a few combat brigades on the ground just sitting in secure garrison posts. Our influence may yet be enough to secure a reasonably free and friendly Iraq, but I don't know why we've risked our costly victory with total withdrawal of combat forces.
Now we rely on Kurds and Shias not doing something really stupid.
UPDATE: We should have more influence than this:
A year after U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq, American officials and their vehicles have all but disappeared from the streets of Baghdad. When U.S. officials emerge from their fortresslike embassy compound, they are clearly no longer the de facto rulers of the country they once were.
Many keep themselves to themselves, preferring to fly over Baghdad rather than drive through it and increasingly avoiding contact with the government of Nouri-al Maliki. One U.S. official told Reuters he had not left the compound in almost 3 years except to return to the United States for leave.
"Americans?" said one Iraqi official asked about U.S.-Iraqi cooperation. "I'd like to see some."
In Washington and other Western capitals, there are mounting worries a failure to negotiate a permanent U.S. military presence may leave them sidelined for good. To make matters worse, they worry Maliki's majority Shi'ite government is quietly moving ever closer to Washington's premier regional foe Tehran.
We spent blood and treasure to be unable to positively influence events in Iraq?
