How long does Iraq’s Al-Maliki Government have before collapse? According to the tenor of recent reports it is heading towards crisis, its life — like that of many Baghdad residents — measured in weeks. Three weeks ago, Shi’ite leader Al-Sadr’s six ministers quit the Government, former Kurdish supporters call him a “weak leader”, and Sunnis point out that he lacks support to get legislation through parliament.

For a moment, he gained both Sunni and Shi’ite support with his opposition to the ghetto wall being built around the Sunni Adaimyah area. More recently, according to Al-Jazeera, he’s countermanded that order — although the source is an American colonel charged with building the ghetto, so who knows where the truth lies.

If Al-Maliki has authorised the completion of the ghetto, he’s been blindsided by both President Talibani, who condemned the wall, as did thousands of residents of the Shi’ite area of Sadr city who demonstrated against it yesterday.

Now, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has damned Al-Maliki with faint praise, saying that the current Iraqi Government was “the one we had to work with”. Al-Maliki has been on a tour of neighbouring countries trying to drum up support but his blatant favouritism of Shi’ites has led to the cold shoulder, with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia refusing to meet him, while Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was distinctly unenthusiastic, confining himself to one perfunctory meeting.

The wall, which mimics similar ad hoc seperation-and-control measures in other cities such as the largely wrecked Fallujah is shaping up to be one of the key issues in the occupation, taking things in directions unknown. The influence of the Israeli ‘ghettoisation’ of the West Bank on the Iraqi process has been made explicit by Nibras Kazimi, one of US client Chalabai’s former aides and a now a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute. He suggested in 2006:

… a “closed canton” method for Baghdad’s Sunni-heavy suburbs… This should be done using the Israeli method: fence them with concrete and technology. The Israelis have been building a separating wall between them and the Palestinians over the past two years.

Of course, he never thought that Shi’ites and Sunnis would unite against the proposal. Why? Because men like Kazimi can’t imagine any relationship to power other than sycophancy — resistance and resilience are unknown to them.

What will happen if Al-Maliki is unseated by a no confidence motion? If the Iraqi Parliament chooses a PM uncongenial to the US, it is possible they will simply deal directly with the Iraqi military (who simply ignored Al-Mailiki’s earlier instructions on the wall) and impose a de facto military dictatorship, though the parliament may continue as a talking shop.

And the wheel turns full circle …