'Iraq and the US have finalised a draft agreement that would permit the US military to remain in the country until 2011.

The proposed deal, announced on Wednesday, would also allow - with certain conditions -Iraq to try American troops charged with committing crimes in the country'.

The fact is, as CSM notes: 'recent progress in Iraq is "fragile" and "reversible."

The paper continues: 'Another troubling development in Iraq - one that has received less attention than the sectarian schisms - is the growing divide between a large and increasingly successful military, and a lagging and increasingly disdained civilian government, says Mr. White, now an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

"The civilian side of government is terribly weak, dysfunctional, and corrupt, and against that is this burgeoning national army that has allowed for most of what Maliki has achieved," he says. "We could see a building of resentment within the Army against Maliki for taking the credit while failing to put the civilian side in order - and that could lead to some kind of action by the Army."

Iraq scholars, who point out that a similar widening governmental divide in the 1950s led to a coup against Iraq's monarchy, say that Iraq could end up with the kind of authoritarian military government more typical of Middle Eastern regimes if the civilian government is not able to overcome its divisions.

"Of course it's a worrying gap, because continuing down that road could result in a strongman taking power," says Ralph Peters, a former US Army intelligence officer specializing in the Middle East.

One problem is that sectarian relations will face a number of possibilities to unravel before the January elections even take place. On the list of Iraq's "dark clouds" that Petraeus offers on a PowerPoint presentation: Nov. 1. That is supposed to be the first "payday" for the 54,000 mostly Sunni "Sons of Iraq" whom the Maliki government agreed to integrate into the Iraqi security forces.