"Although it is extraordinarily difficult at a time when Iraqis are under attack, the Iraqi government needs to resist the sectarian Isis narrative and to recognise that Isis is distinct from Iraq's Sunni community. Iraqi Sunnis don't want to be governed by Isis, they don't support the massacre of Shia civilians and they don't want another civil war. But they also don't believe there is a place for them in Maliki's Iraq."

"The United States must use its assistance as leverage to prevent Mr. Maliki from becoming, in effect, a dictator. Many young Iraqis who join the Sunni militants already see the government as a sectarian oppressor. The Maliki government has targeted senior Sunni politicians, and failed to respond to Sunni demands for reform. Its exclusionary approach has helped enable extremism, and the United States must ensure that Mr. Maliki does not use the new outbreak of fighting to shore up his authority."

"The greatest political challenge facing Iraq today is its transition from a power-sharing to a majoritarian form of government without a concomitant depoliticization of ethno-sectarian identities."

The invasion of Iraq prompted a deluge of work written on the country from a U.S. perspective, but Nussaibah Younis, a fellow with the Belfer Center's International Security Program, wants people to start considering Iraq as an actor in its own right. While at the  Center, Younis is working on a project that seeks to understand internal Iraqi foreign policymaking dynamics since 2003.

"...Mr. Maliki, who took office in 2006, had a successful first term, he has squandered the opportunity to heal the nation in his second term, which began in 2010. He has taken a hard sectarian line on security and political challenges. He has resisted integrating Sunnis into the army. He has accused senior Sunni politicians of being terrorists, hounded them from power and lost the cooperation of the Sunni community. The result: the political bargain that had sustained the fragile Iraqi state broke down."

"...Mr. Maliki is not making an irrational choice in allowing assistance for the Assad regime next door. He is supporting an Iranian regime that brokered his own return to power, while also guarding against the possibility that the rise of a Sunni government in Syria could reignite the Iraqi civil war. So it is up to the United States to change Mr. Maliki's calculations to bring them in line with American interests."