MANILA, Philippines — The US pulled out of Iraq according to schedule and left behind a government that should have been “stable and self-reliant” in the words of President Obama, and able to run the country and handle its own security.

But it hasn’t worked out that way. The day after the last of the US forces left Iraq, the unresolved Sunni-Shite conflict erupted when the Shia-dominant government of President al-Malaki ordered the arrest of Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi.

Apparently anticipating just such a move, Hashimi was already out of reach of Baghdad, in the remote Kurdish region of the country. Contacted by the international press, Hashimi said that the arrest warrant was politically motivated, an effort on the part of the Iraqi president to “neutralize” his political and sectarian opponents and establish an authoritarian one-man rule.

The Shiites represent 63% of the population of Iraq, and when the US left, it was with the understanding that a government would be formed with a coalition of Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish representatives.

But that has not happened, although US Vice President Joe Biden and CIA Director, General David Petraeus, both travelled to Iraq, to try to encourage the formation of a coalition government. The danger, from the Western point of view, is that the Sunni-Shia conflict will create a power vacuum that the Taliban will be only too happy to fill, and then take over the country.

President Obama has made it clear that the US will not send a military force back to Iraq. The administration is concentrating on the economic and financial concerns on the home front, and does not want to be involved in another overseas war. The only US military presence in Iraq today are the 200 members of the Office of Security Cooperation attached to the US embassy in Baghdad. The CIA also oper-ates an anti-terrorism group which is independent of the US military.

Iraq’s former Prime Minister Ayad Allowi warned that America’s unconditional support of the Malaki government is pushing Iraq “down the path to civil war.”