The latest celebration of light at the end of the tunnel started with an undoubted success: The location and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's director of operations in Iraq and the driving force behind the merciless massacres of Shiite civilians. That event seemed to give additional significance to the formation of a new, more pro-American government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Then last week U.S. President George W. Bush paid a brief visit to Iraq where he conferred with Maliki and pledged continued U.S. support to him. In a policy speech back in the United States, the president spelled out a policy on Iraq that was described by some sympathetic commentators as "Iraqi-ization."

But all of this assumes that Iraqi already has -- or can have in the near future -- an effective state structure and bureaucracy capable of delivering the basic necessities of life including power and security to at least a significant part of its population. Khalizad's long cable reproduced in the Post is stark testament to the utter failure of U.S. and allied Iraqi efforts more than three years after the fall of Saddam Hussein to have delivered any of these things.

Iraqi employees of the U.S. embassy have reported that Iraqi government security forces guarding the entrances to the "Green Zone," supposedly the only fully secure section of Baghdad, have become "more militia-like" in recent weeks, openly taunting embassy employees who pass through, the ambassador wrote.

Sectarian divisions, Khalizad wrote, have hardened dramatically across Iraq in the four months since the Shiite Golden Mosque, or Al-Askariya mosque, in Samara was bombed by insurgents on Feb. 22. Extreme Islamist sentiments in many part of Baghdad have intensified so much in both Sunni and Shiite areas that even the wearing of jeans or shorts or the public use of cell phones by women provokes harassment.

The cable does not directly state, but it leaves no doubt by its descriptions, that neither U.S. nor even Iraqi government security forces have any effective influence on life in Sadr City, a huge Shiite district area of Baghfad containing more than a million people.

Khalizad is remarkably explicit about the erosion of government control and the rising power of independent militias. "Our staff report that security and services are being rerouted through 'local providers' whose affiliations are vague," he wrote. ".. Those who are admonishing citizens on their dress are not known to the residents.

Neighborhood power providers are not known either. ... Personal safety depends on good relations with the neighborhood 'governments.' who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or coopted by militias."

Khalizad deserves note for the remarkable frankness and explicit description in his report. His honesty and accuracy in reporting back to his superiors the dangers, sufferings and underlying conditions experienced by his Iraqi civilian staff are very unlikely to be welcomed by top policymakers in an administration that has always regarded unswerving loyalty to the party line as the most essential quality it demanded of its senior officials.

The ambassador's dispatch confirms the assessments and predictions we have been making in these columns over the past four months since the Iraq war metastasized following the Golden Mosque bombing. We have repeatedly documented and noted the growing power of the Shiite -- as well as the Sunni -- militias, their independence from the central government and its inability to exercise effective control over them.

Far from being reduced by the replacement of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari with the new government of Prime Minister Maliki, these developments, pushed by U.S. officials, have only made the problem far worse.

For Jaafari worked in consultation and with the approval of most of the rising new Shiite militias. Maliki has spoken repeatedly about the need to rein in those militias but he lacks any real ability to so so.

As Khalizad documented in his cable, even in the capital Baghdad, where government power ought to be strongest, most people look to the militias rather than the government and its official security forces as the final arbiters of life and death, and as the only reliable providers of personal safety.

We predicted this development in these columns after the Feb 22 Golden Mosque bombing when we noted that "Belfast and Beirut rules" were now operating in Baghdad. In other words, the war had transformed from a simple "us versus them" direct conflict between a partially-effective government and a single insurgent movement into a splintered conflict between many different militias and movements, where the central government was left with no umbrella credibility.

Some 350 years ago, the great English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes described this condition as "the natural state of man," a condition which, he said, was invariably "nasty, brutish and short."

The only cure for these conditions, Hobbes wrote, based on his experiences in the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, was the construction of "Leviathan," a large, powerful authoritarian government that could reconstruct from scratch and guarantee essential security and services to its population.

Neither the new Maliki government in Baghdad nor the exhausted, undermanned and over-stretched 130,000 U.S. soldiers currently serving in Iraq is in any position to do any of that.

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