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Who is the enemy? Who is the United States fighting in Iraq? And what's the objective?

Nearly five years into the war, the answers to these basic questions should be obvious. In the Alice in Wonderland-like wilderness of mirrors that is Iraq, though, they're anything but.

The U.S. isn't fighting the Sunnis any more. Almost the entire Sunni establishment is either actively co-operating with the American military or sullenly tolerating what it hopes will be a receding occupation. Across Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq, the U.S. is helping to build army and police units as well as neighbourhood patrols — the Pentagon calls them "concerned citizens" — out of former resistance fighters. Attacks on U.S. forces in Sunni-dominated areas, including the once violent hot-bed city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, have fallen dramatically.

U.S. forces aren't fighting the Shiites. The Shia merchant class and elite, organized into the mostly pro-Iranian Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and the Islamic Dawa party, are part of the government that the United States created and supports. The far more popular forces of Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army aren't the enemy either. In August, Mr. al-Sadr declared a ceasefire, ordering his militia to stand down; since then, attacks on U.S. forces in Shia-dominated areas of Iraq have fallen off sharply. Though recent, provocative attacks by U.S. troops, in conjunction with Iraqi forces, on Sadrist strongholds in Baghdad, Diwaniya and Karbala have caused Mr. al-Sadr to threaten to cancel the ceasefire, and though intra-Shiite fighting is still occurring in many parts of southern Iraq, there is no Shia enemy that justifies a continued American presence.

And the United States certainly isn't fighting the Kurds. For decades, the Kurds have been America's closest allies in Iraq. Since 2003, the three Kurdish-dominated provinces have been fairly peaceful.

The United States isn't exactly fighting al-Qaeda any more either. Despite U.S. President George Bush's almost frantic efforts to portray the war as a last-ditch, Alamo-like stand against Osama bin Laden's army, commanders on the ground are having a hard time finding pockets of al-Qaeda to attack these days. In recent weeks, General David Petraeus, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and other authorities have pretty much declared al-Qaeda in Iraq dead and buried. That happy funeral is the result not of brilliant U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, but of the resolve of America's new-found Sunni allies to exterminate the group. Gen. Petraeus now admits that al-Qaeda has been expelled from all its strongholds in Baghdad. In Anbar, says Mr. Crocker, "People do feel the weight's off. Al-Qaeda is simply gone."

And, nearly a year after President Bush proclaimed Iran to be Public Enemy No. 1 in Iraq, blaming Tehran for supporting both al-Qaeda and Shia militias, things are getting better on that front. Last week, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates declared that Iran had quietly promised to halt the smuggling of weapons and advanced roadside bombs into Iraq. "I don't know whether to believe them. I'll wait and see," he said, downgrading the White House's earlier, alarmist warnings about Iran.

General Ray Odierno, the commanding general of the multinational forces in Iraq, noted a sharp decline in the use of EFPs (explosively formed penetrators), the sort of improvised explosive device that the United States blames Iran for supplying. Partly as a result, Mr. Crocker announced that he will resume a dialogue with the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi. And the United States has announced its intention to release a number of Iranians detained in Iraq.

Violence in Iraq has dropped precipitously since late summer. With al-Qaeda declared dead, former Sunni resistance fighters wearing American-supplied uniforms, and the Mahdi Army lying low, killings are way down. The security situation is far better than at any time since 2005.

Coming back to life

The improvement since August is indisputable. According to the careful compilers at the website icasualties.org, both U.S. and Iraqi deaths have fallen steeply. In May, June and July, more than a hundred Americans were killed each month; for August, September, and October the totals were 84, 65 and 38. Iraqis are much better off; military and civilian deaths fell from 3,000 a month earlier this year to 848 and 679 in September and October. Across Baghdad, hundreds of shops are reopening, children are going back to school, and street cafés are filled in the evenings.

As for Anbar, in January, attacks on U.S. forces in its capital came at the rate of 30 per day; today, there is less than one a day. During the recent month-long Ramadan holiday, there were only four attacks on U.S. forces; during Ramadan 2006, there were 442.

None of this means that Iraq has become Sweden. It's still a violent place. There is no real government; the economy is in shambles; basic services — electricity, water, trash collection — are erratic or non-existent; and most areas are ruled by militias, gangs, criminals or warlords. Still, with no enemy left to fight, and with violence way down, it's time to declare victory and leave.

There's reason to hope that the Iraqis are readier than ever to pull their country back together again. For the first time since the 2003 invasion, there is a real opportunity for the two main blocs of Iraqi Arabs, the Sunni and Shia communities, to strike a deal. If such a deal were struck, the Kurds would have little choice but to buy into it.

Nascent national unity

A new, nationalist Iraq is emerging underneath the presence of 160,000 U.S. troops. That nationalism extends from the current and former Sunni resistance fighters to Mr. al-Sadr's Mahdi Army to a range of moderate, secular Sunni and Shia politicians, all of whom — albeit under exceedingly difficult circumstances — are now talking to each other about a political framework for a new government.

But the United States cannot broker the deal. Having spent five years boosting sectarianism in Iraq, killing innocent Iraqis and busting down doors in villages, the U.S. has no credibility.

Any deal the U.S. brokers, any leader it promotes, gets the kiss of death. Iraqi Arabs, from the Sunni resistance to the Mahdi Army, are united by opposition to the U.S. occupation, as well as to al-Qaeda and to Iran's heavy-handed interference.

Two urgent steps are needed, to capitalize on the re-emerging Iraqi nationalism. First, the broad-based majorities among Sunni and Shia Arabs must be reconciled under a new constitution, with new elections creating a new government untainted by American oversight. Second, Iraq's neighbours — all of them, including Iran and Syria — have to underwrite the new Iraqi nationalism.

With its track record, the Bush administration cannot accomplish either of these tasks. It's a job for the United Nations, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other parties. And all of this, in turn, depends on the United States announcing a timetable for withdrawing its forces.

As noted by countless observers, including official ones, the United States has so far been unable to translate the decline in violence into political gains. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) made this point, accusing the administration of failing to take advantage of the improved security situation. With a great deal of understatement, the GAO said: "U.S. efforts lack strategies with clear purpose, scope, roles and performance measures." In other words, the United States doesn't know what it's doing.

Or maybe it does. In fact, it's beginning to look more and more as if the Washington establishment has every intention to stay put in Iraq for decades to come. Many centrist Republicans and moderate Democrats support a long occupation followed by a still longer period in which the presence of U.S. forces will remain significant.

Former Centcom Commander General John Abizaid, no zealot, recently predicted that U.S. forces would have to stay in the Middle East "for the next 25 to 50 years," and he was pretty blunt about the importance of oil. "I'm not saying this is a war for oil, but I am saying that oil fuels an awful lot of geopolitical moves that political powers may take there." Notably, it was recently reported that U.S. legal advisers to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil helped Iraq to cancel an enormous Russian oil deal with Iraq to develop its West Qurna oil field, which the New York Times called "one of a dozen or so supergiant oil fields in the world." Not that the war had anything to do with oil, mind you.

Robert Dreyfuss is an independent investigative journalist in Alexandria, Va. He is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone, The Nation, The American Prospect, Mother Jones and the Washington Monthly.

He is also the author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam" (Henry Holt/Metropolitan, 2005).

His website is RobertDreyfuss.com.

A longer version of this article appeared at TomDispatch.com