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Three months after parliamentary elections, Iraqis are still without a national-unity government, explained in this CFR Background Q&A. Divisions among Iraq's various ethnic and religious factions, as well as ongoing sectarian violence, have stalled negotiations. Finding some form of détente between the Shiite and Sunni communities, as CFR Senior Fellow Steven Biddle writes in Foreign Affairs, will be critical to avoiding all-out civil war and achieving political progress in Iraq.

President Bush, on the stump to shore up American support for U.S. efforts in Iraq, said "now it's time for a government to get stood up." His comments were the closest Washington has come to expressing impatience (NYT) with the delayed formation of Iraq's government, which Washington says is critical to the country's stability. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad continues to pressure politicians there to work together, telling World News Tonight a new government "is the single most important issue that Iraq faces right now." Khalilzad worked with Iraq's factions this week to form a national security council, made up of nineteen members—mostly Shiites—to decide military, economic, and oil policies (Guardian). Policymakers hope this stopgap measure will assuage Sunni oppositionists, who last month blocked the choice of Ibrahim al-Jaafari for prime minister over his alleged ties to Shiite militias. To be sure, it is not just Shiites and Sunnis vying for power in Iraq's future government; Kurds and Christians will also play important roles, as these two CFR Background Q&As explain.

The ongoing violence will continue to pose challenges to the already difficult process of forming a government in Iraq. Anthony Cordesman, a leading Middle East and intelligence expert, tells cfr.org's Bernard Gwertzman that three years after the invasion of Iraq, "Iraqis are worse off, on average, as individuals, than they were before [the United States] invaded." As many as 700 people have been killed since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra February 22, and many of those deaths appear to be the result of interethnic conflict. Experts are wary that those charged with securing Iraq are themselves part of the problem. Matthew Sherman, a former Interior Ministry adviser, tells cfr.org the number of commandos with sectarian militia ties has jumped from roughly 6,000 to around 10,000 over the past year, while Brookings' Kenneth Pollack, an expert on the region, says militias are even more destabilizing than the insurgency.

Meanwhile, the conduct of some U.S. forces is, once again, under scrutiny. This week, TIME magazine reported on an alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians by American Marines bent on revenge after a roadside bombing claimed one of their own. Iraqi police have also blamed U.S. troops for the deaths of eleven people (Houston Chronicle), including a 75-year-old woman and a six-month-old infant, north of Baghdad.

In terms of support for U.S. policies in Iraq and the world at large, these incidents have meant the war has had a "clearly negative" impact on U.S. foreign policy, says Richard Haass, CFR president and head of policy planning at the State Department at the outbreak of the war. Haass tells cfr.org's Bernard Gwertzman the war has weakened the United States both militarily and diplomatically in dealing with crises involving Iran and North Korea.

Still, the consensus of a group of experts, journalists, and military specialists interviewed by cfr.org is that the war is not yet lost, but Washington needs to press ahead with initiatives ranging from police reform to economic reconstruction.