“Will Iraq survive?” is the question on everyone’s lips, but is it the wrong question? Should we really be asking whether the country still exists at all?

Prime Minister Al-Maliki doesn’t seem to think so. Following the departure of yet another Sunni bloc from government, with the resignation of six ministers at the beginning of August, he was calling for a summit of Iraqi community leaders to work out the country’s problems.

Actually a parliament is a summit of people trying to work out the country’s problems, and the acknowledgment that this no longer represents anything much – and hence that blocs of interests must be represented by their undemocratically chosen leaders – is a de facto admission of the total breakdown of government institutions.

If further proof were needed of Al-Maliki’s attitude, there’s his recent visit to Iran, at about exactly the same time as the US government was talking about putting the country’s Revolutionary Guard, an arm of the Iranian state, on the list of proscribed terrorist organisations. This unprecedented and barely noticed move is a pretty bizarre further step along the road of unilateralism, at a time when the US’s power to assert this policy has been pretty effectively demolished.

But Al-Maliki going to Tehran is a sign not only of his anticipation of a US disengagement sooner rather than later, but also of now total reliance on Shiite, rather than cross-community, support in a situation of total fragmentation.

You couldn’t fault his logic to judge by the situation in Basra, from which the British withdrew 50% of their forces last year, trumpeting the stabilisation of a region and a handover to local forces. Basra is now detached from the country as a whole, entirely run by gangs and militias, and the British process of partial withdrawal is being seen as an object lesson in how not to get out of Dodge City.

The recent suicide bombing of the Yezidi people (a small remnant religion worshipping an angel-figure, seen by some fundamentalists Christian and Islamic as a satanic cult), with a death toll now standing at 400, has made visible a process of heightened ethnic violence, increasingly turned on smaller groups as the struggle for ethnically pure areas continues.

Indeed the one thing that is promoting unity is the proposed new oil law – everyone’s against this racket handing over oil to transnationals for the foreseeable future, save for the puppets who drafted it. In a world where 80% of the world’s oil is under the control of national companies, stitching up Iraqi oil for US-based outfits does suggest that oil was, after all, a big driver of the war.

Still, the point may well be moot, as yet another report suggests that even a federal system is a luxury about which Iraqis can only dream, with a stateless civil war, a gap on the map, becoming the most likely option.