Maliki always had his own script – now he’s acting it out

Toni Karon in the National, here

"In the Washington of the US president George W Bush, “the other war” was shorthand for Afghanistan; today, ....President Barack Obama has always made it clear that he believed Iraq had been “the wrong war” and, taking office at a moment when he hoped Iraq was on course to an acceptable outcome, he immediately recast the battle against the Taliban and al Qa’eda in the “Afghanistan-Pakistan” theatre as America’s strategic priority.....

Iraq, however, seems to stubbornly reject its demotion to second place on Washington’s list of strategic priorities.... violence looks likely to intensify, even as US troops prepare to redeploy out of Iraq’s cities by the end of June, in line with a Status of Forces Agreement that will see them leave Iraq altogether by the end of 2011. The US may be growing anxious – alarmed even – at the deterioration that threatens in Iraq, but Washington’s ability to shape conditions on the ground is already limited, and likely to decline further. Just as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama Administration is forced in Iraq to rely on local leaders at odds with US strategy.

The Iraqi prime minister Nouri al Maliki was never Washington’s choice to lead Iraq, but he won out with the Shiite majority of an Iraqi electorate whose political preferences are closer to Tehran than to the US. And while he played the game of saying – and very occasionally doing – the things that Washington expected of him, Maliki has proven adept at building himself a power base independent of the US, principally by establishing the foundations of a traditional Arab strongman’s regime through the loyalties he has cultivated in a burgeoning military and mukhbarat. And he has never shown much enthusiasm for the political component of Washington’s Iraq pacification strategy – reconciling with the country’s Sunnis in the country’s former ruling class........ Washington expected Maliki to bring the Sunnis in from the cold by reversing many of the de-Baathification measures that had shut much of the country’s Sunni leadership and professional classes out of government by virtue of simply having been members of the former ruling party.

Maliki, however, not only declined to significantly reverse de-Baathification or to play ball in discreet negotiations brokered by the US with Baathist insurgent leaders in exile. He clearly viewed the Awakening as a potential threat to his own government and acted accordingly. ....The Awakening fighters and their leaders feel that they have been betrayed by the US and have walked off the job, or even found their way back into the ranks of the active insurgency.......Those developments, coupled with mounting Kurdish-Arab tension over the fate of areas such as Kirkuk, have prompted some US commanders to wonder out loud whether keeping to their redeployment and withdrawal timetable is a good idea. Maliki appears happy to have them around to help him hobble his foes.... But the prime minister is less likely than ever to accept Washington’s political tutelage, and he made clear last week that the final deadline for US withdrawal will not be changed.

Despite its disruptive potential, the Sunni insurgency lacks the capacity to topple Maliki, and thus far his key Shiite rivals have refrained from reactivating their militias to exact sectarian revenge. “There’ll always be some sort of low-level insurgency in Iraq for the next five, 10, 15 years,” the US commander in Iraq Gen Ray Odierno said on Friday. “The issue is, what is the level of that insurgency? And can Iraqis handle it with their own forces and their own government?” Maliki appears to be positioning himself as the strongman of a post-US Iraq, the future of which will look quite unlike what Washington had imagined. The sectarian tensions that have fuelled the country’s civil war appear unlikely to be resolved, and will continue to fuel conflict both within Iraq – and possibly throughout the region – for the foreseeable future."