Iraq Tips Toward the Abyss

Fifty-four Iraqis were killed and another 70 injured Sunday when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in a Baghdad cafe. But you probably didn't catch the news.

The tree falls in the forest, the country collapses in the desert, and the question remains the same: Does either of them make a sound if nobody can be bothered to listen? Iraq, where 4,488 Americans recently and bravely gave their lives, and over which Washington obsessed for two decades, has effectively ceased to exist for the purposes of U.S. politics. The show has been canceled; there will be no reruns. Barack Obama's Iraq achievement is that you are now free to think of suicide bombings in Baghdad as you might a mud slide in Pakistan or a cholera outbreak in Haiti: As a bad, but remote, fact.

Except there have been a lot of suicide bombings lately in Iraq. Consider just the past two months:

Aug. 22: Insurgent attacks, including a suicide bomber at a wedding, kill 24 people throughout the country. Aug. 23: A suicide bomber kills 36 people in a park in northern Baghdad.

Sept. 21: Two suicide bombers kill 72 mourners at a Shiite funeral in Baghdad. Sept. 22: A suicide bomber kills 16 and wounds 35 at another Baghdad funeral. Sept. 23: At yet another funeral, two more suicide bombers murder at least 14.

Oct. 5: A suicide bomber kills 66 Shiite pilgrims and injures 80 in Baghdad. Oct. 6: A wave of attacks kill at least 33 people throughout the country, including 12 children at an elementary school. Oct. 7: A wave of bombings hit multiple neighborhoods in Baghdad and kill at least 45. Oct. 17: Another 61 people die in nine car bomb explosions.

Altogether some 7,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed so far this year, approaching levels last seen in 2008. Most of the killing has been done by al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a group that in 2009 had been so thoroughly beaten by the combination of the U.S. surge and the Sunni Awakening that it barely existed. Now it's back, killing more people than any other al Qaeda franchise, attempting to tip Iraq toward civil war and joining ranks with its jihadist allies in Syria.

At what point does all this start to, you know, worry us?

Maybe when they start killing Americans again. Until then, the reflex political reaction regarding the return of AQI is to insist that it is a local group with mostly local ambitions, and that it is largely a reaction to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's purportedly anti-Sunni policies. Nothing in life is harder to unseat than a settled and comfortable assumption.

Still, assumptions must inevitably run up against facts. No ostensibly "local" al Qaeda branch has ever remained local for long, a point brought home last month when Somalia's al-Shabaab went on an epic killing spree at Nairobi's Westgate Mall.

By doing so little to stop the spiraling chaos in Iraq and Syria, the administration isn't keeping America out of harm's way. It is allowing the next generation of jihadists to incubate, hatch and grow, mostly undisturbed by us. For more on how that works out, think about U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, 1989-2001.

It's also a fact that, despite his reputation as an inveterate sectarian, Mr. Maliki still runs a more-or-less democratic state, an American achievement worth trying to preserve. He faces elections next year, does not have a united Shiite bloc and has been reaching out to Sunnis in order to find a political settlement. The effort includes allowing former Baathists to hold government offices and devolving power from the central government to the provinces. The problem in Iraq isn't that Mr. Maliki is too much of an autocrat. It's that America took itself almost entirely out of the picture.

The point doesn't square with the conventional wisdom that developed about Iraq midway through the last decade. Back then, the idea was that it was America's presence in the country that strengthened AQI, and that America's departure was therefore bound to weaken it. "Without that rallying cry [of opposing U.S. occupation], what would al Qaeda have left?" the Cato Institute's Christopher Preble and Justin Logan asked in late 2005. The answer, as this year's bloody mounting toll testifies, is plenty.

Let's make this simple: What al Qaeda wants is power. It believes it can achieve power through what one of its theoreticians once called "the management of savagery." The more chaotic the Middle East, the more hospitable it is to al Qaeda's goals. That is why Mr. Obama's retreat from Iraq and his refusal to intervene in Syria in the war's early days have been such a boon to al Qaeda. The longer this goes on, the stronger al Qaeda will get.

Mr. Maliki is scheduled to visit the White House next week. Iraq has been asking the U.S. for help with counterterrorism, including the use of U.S. drones to help secure its porous border with Syria. An administration more mindful of U.S. security interests than of its campaign slogans should help the Iraqis out. Americans may think they've changed the channel on Iraq, but the grisly show goes on. Pay attention before it gets worse.