Dan Rather

In March 2006, two weeks after the dome of Iraq's Samarra shrine was destroyed by unknown bombers, your reporter wrote in this space about the tragic plight of ordinary Iraqis: They live in what is ostensibly a democracy, but despite President Bush's repeated assertions that they face a choice of "chaos or unity", they don't really have a say in the matter. Instead it is the most violent, the most bent on stirring sectarian conflict, who are doing the voting for them with bombs and murder.

Now, more than a year after that bombing, these same forces have cast another ballot for chaos by destroying the minarets that, until this week, remained standing in Samarra's Golden Mosque, one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrines.

The first bombing of the Golden Mosque unleashed a season of bloodshed, of Shi'ite reprisals and Sunni counter-reprisals. Iraq stood, as I and others wrote at the time, on the brink of an abyss — the abyss being outright, full-blown, fighting-in-the-streets civil war.

President Bush has depicted the first Samarra bombing as a turning point, the act that upset Iraq's slow but steady march toward becoming a functioning civil and democratic society. This, as has been pointed out, bypasses the fact that sectarian violence had been well on the rise for more than a year before the dome was destroyed. It was more exclamation point than start of a new sentence, an intensification rather than an initiation of Sunni-Shi'ite provocation.

So what?

So nearly 16 months later and in the midst of the administration's 'surge' strategy, what does this latest provocation tell us about the state of Iraq, and its prospects for the future?

As incongruous as it might seem, small shards of hope can be found amid the rubble of the shattered minarets. In the column from last March, I noted the opposite roles being played by Iraq's two most prominent Shi'ite leaders, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr — Sistani calling repeatedly for restraint, and Sadr, with the brute force of his Shi'ite militia, stirring conflict. In the hours after this week's bombing, however, both men sounded notes of restraint.

This is the micron-thin silver lining to the events at the Golden Mosque. Sadr's calls for peaceful protest and his refusal to blame Sunni Muslims for the destruction, along with a curfew in Baghdad and the presence of additional U.S. troops, kept at least the immediate aftermath from becoming a replay of last year's horrific bloodletting.

But it will take more than words and a stepped-up military presence to keep Iraq from the abyss on which it teeters still. What it will take, most of all, are political solutions to Iraq's thorniest unresolved issues, such as the distribution of the country's oil wealth.

Take some time to tell

Just how this past week's events will affect these long-delayed political imperatives will take some time to tell. Sadr has instructed his bloc to carry out yet another boycott of the Iraqi parliament, with untold consequences for the search for compromise and for the government of Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's embattled prime minister.

In one's greatest hopes, one could write a script in which this most recent view of the abyss convinces Iraq's Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish leaders that they must come to a settlement, and must do so quickly to save what is left of their country. But this seems like far too optimistic a story line for a nation so battered and scarred, so primed to hate — a nation where there is no end in sight to the violence, nor the American commitment in blood and treasure.