As the U.S. military is gone and before the U.S. embassy force of some 16,000 people is assembled Iraqi premier Maliki is using the time to clean the house:
A day after the United States withdrew its last combat troops, Iraq faced a dangerous political crisis Monday as the Shiite-dominated government ordered the arrest of the Sunni vice president, accusing him of running a death squad that assassinated police officers and government officials.
Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi may well have run death squads or planned for a coup. It doesn't really matter.
That Maliki would not let the Sunni politicians have any serious power was clear since he, despite the post-election coalition agreement, kept the interior and defense ministry under his personal control. That he would push the Sunni further away from power after the threat of the U.S. military was removed was obvious too. His next target will be the former(?) CIA agent and leader of the Sunni Iraqiya coalition Allawi.
The question is now if this house cleaning will lead to a renewed civil war. The Saudis may have an interest to finance another Sunni insurrection in Iraq but I doubt that it will happen. An insurrection or civil war needs some energetic support from some part of the population. But after nine exhaustive years of war that needed fervor is likely to have burned itself out.
People by now will have enough of it. They will want to concentrate on rebuilding their cities and their lives. As long as the state is willing to dole out some money to help with that, and Iraq has the money to do so, they will have little interest in a renewed conflict.
After Maliki has removed the possible threat from the Sunni side and established a firmer hold on the state he will concentrate on the Kurdish part of the country. The autonomy the Kurds have developed over the last two decades is a long term threat to the integrity of the Iraqi state.
The trick there will be to use the traditional split between the clan of the current President of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region and leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party Massoud Barzani, and the clan of the current President of Iraq Jalal Talabani and his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. During their last conflict 1996 Barzani called on Saddam Hussein to fight Talabani's PUK while Talabini had support from Iran. As no country in the region but Israel has an interest in an autonomous Kurdistan Maliki is likely able to co-opt Talabani and assert more control over Barzani and the Iraqi Kurdish region.
U.S. influence in Iraq is in freefall. It clearly has no more control over anything happening there. Historians may point out that this was inevitable after Ayatollah Sistani demanded a democratically elected government instead of the unelected colonial regime the U.S. pro-consul Bremer had planned for. From there on majority rule took over the Shia rose to their natural position.
Within U.S. politics there is no more interest in Iraq, it is out of sight and out of the mind of the electorate. The lessons to be learned from the war will therefore be lost and what led to the war and the errors throughout it will be repeated.