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The media spotlight on the Arab world shifts focus almost every month: counterrevolution in Egypt, civil war in Syria, an American raid in Libya... It rarely stays on Iraq for long, because the violence there has been going on so long that it has become part of the scenery. But just be patient a little longer.

Five months ago, a British fraudster called James McCormick was jailed for 10 years for selling novelty hand-held golf-ball detectors (cost $20) to the Iraqi government as bomb detectors (cost $40,000). Yet the Iraqi security services are still using the preposterous devices, which don’t even have a power source. This tells you all you need to know about the situation in the country

It’s not because the Iraqis are unaware of the problem. McCormick allegedly received $75 million from the Iraqi government for the useless toys, and at least a third of that amount would have gone as kickbacks to the government officials who signed off on the deal. That much lolly was bound to attract the jealousy of rival government officials, and so there has indeed been an Iraqi investigation into the deal.

Three local culprits, including Maj.-Gen. Jihad al-Jabiri, the head of the Defence Ministry’s directorate of combat explosives, even went to jail over the crime. (They were probably insufficiently generous in sharing their good fortune with other high-office holders.) But as late as last May Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was still insisting that the “ADE-651” golf-ball detectors were effective—and they are still in widespread use today.

This is beyond bizarre, because Iraq is currently losing about a thousand lives a month to terrorist bombings. True, five times as many people are being killed each month in the civil war in neighbouring Syria, but civil wars always kill many more people than mere terrorism.

The fear now is that Iraq is drifting towards a sectarian civil war as well. Maliki’s government, which is dominated by politicians from the Shia majority of the Arab population, effectively controls only about half the country. The Kurds, who would really rather be independent, control the north, and have little interest in inter-Arab disputes. And the Sunni Arabs deeply resent being under Shia rule.

There has been a revolution in Iraq in the past decade, although it was not the democratic one that the American invaders thought they were bringing. In overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, they also ended many centuries of domination by the Sunni Arab minority. Now it’s Shia Arabs who rule the roost, and the Sunnis are largely frozen out of the government, the army, and the civil service.

That may be even more important in alienating the Sunni community from the post-American settlement than the constant arrests and torture of Sunnis suspected of antigovernment activity. Unemployment in Iraq is 30 percent, and half the jobs that do exist are in the gift of the government. They almost all go to Shias, and the Sunnis have fallen on very hard times.

Mass Sunni protests began almost a year ago, and until last April they were almost entirely nonviolent. Sunni terrorists belonging to al-Qaeda–related jihadist organizations— another by-product of the American occupation—were killing about 300 Shias a month, but they had little support in the broader Sunni community.

Then in April the Iraqi (i.e. Shia) army raided a peaceful protest camp in Hawijah, killing about 50 Sunnis, and suddenly the violent minority of Sunni jihadists came to be seen as defenders of Sunni rights. In May the death toll from terrorism leaped to 700. By June it was almost a thousand, and by now some of them were Sunnis killed by Shia counterterrorists. July, August and September have each brought about a thousand more victims.

This is heading back toward a civil war on the scale of what happened in Iraq in 2006-2007, under the American occupation, when some 3,000 people were being killed each month, and the government is doing nothing effective to stop it. But then, the government does nothing effective in any domain.

The Iraq government gets $100 billion a year in oil revenue, but nothing gets built or maintained or repaired. Most people live in poverty, while the bulk of the oil income goes on salaries for government employees, a large majority of whom either don’t show up for work at all, or fail to do any useful work when they get there. The rest of the money is simply stolen by the government’s own senior officials.

The fake bomb detectors are part of that vast hemorrhage of cash, and one possible reason that they have not been replaced yet is that some people will obviously make a lot of money out of the contract for whatever replaces them. Until the question of which people has been decided, nothing will be done.

The soldiers and police using them in the streets don’t mind. If they should find a bomb in a car, the suicide bomber driving it will almost detonate the explosives and kill them. So a bomb detector that doesn’t detect bombs is just fine with them.