Iraq's Maliki and Iran outsmart the US

Political turmoil flares in Iraq as U.S. pulls out

CNN

18 December, 2011

 Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is asking lawmakers to withdraw confidence from his deputy after Saleh al-Mutlaq made controversial comments this week over American forces withdrawing from Iraq, state media reported late Saturday.

In a recent interview with CNN, al-Mutlaq accused al-Maliki of amassing dictatorial power.

"There will be a day whereby the Americans will realize that they were deceived by al-Maliki ... and they will regret that," said al-Mutlaq, a leader within Iraqiya movement.

Al-Maliki's request followed word that Iraqiya, a powerful political bloc, won't participate in the country's parliament -- a move that would threaten Iraq's fragile power-sharing arrangement.

The Iraqiya bloc, a largely secular and cross-sectarian group headed by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, made the move on Friday night. The bloc is one of the largest and most powerful political groups in Iraq and boasts among its members the speaker of the parliament. The bloc had been in a power-sharing deal with al-Maliki's State of Law Alliance, backed mostly by Shiites.

Iraqiya accuses al-Maliki of trying to consolidate his own power rather than share it.

His rivals say, for example, that he still controls the country's security ministries and all decisions go through him. They also say that the hundreds of people seized by the government in October for backing terrorism and supporting the banned Baath Party are Iraqiya supporters.

Iraqiya spokesman Haider al-Mulla said the bloc has always warned about the deal's risks and says the State of Law Alliance has been violating the law.

"Iraqiya has always expressed its rejection to the policy of exclusion and marginalization, lack of power sharing, politicization of the judiciary, the lack of balance within the government institutions," al-Mulla said.

Al-Maliki won a second term as prime minister in 2010 after a months-long dispute among the leading parties in the country's parliamentary elections. The largely secular Iraqiya movement won two more seats than al-Maliki's party, but a merger of the premier's Shiite Muslim slate with a smaller Shiite bloc put him first in line to form a government.

There had been fears of renewed bloodshed between Iraq's majority Shiite and minority Sunni populations and that prompted U.S. officials to work out a power-sharing agreement, bringing the Iraqiya movement into the government.

Al-Mutlaq told CNN that Washington is leaving Iraq "with a dictator" who has ignored a power-sharing agreement, kept control of the country's security forces and rounded up hundreds of people in recent weeks.

He said he was "shocked" to hear U.S. President Barack Obama greet al-Maliki at the White House on Monday as "the elected leader of a sovereign, self-reliant and democratic Iraq."

"America left Iraq with almost no infrastructure. The political process is going in a very wrong direction, going toward a dictatorship," he said. "People are not going to accept that, and most likely they are going to ask for the division of the country. And this is going to be a disaster. Dividing the country isn't going to be smooth, because dividing the country is going to be a war before that and a war after that."

Neighboring Iran, predominantly Shiite and led by a Shiite regime, views al-Maliki as its man in Baghdad and has dictated the shape of the current government, al-Mutlaq said. But he said al-Maliki is playing games with both Washington and Tehran.

The last U.S. troops are scheduled to be out of Iraq by the end of December, nearly nine years after the 2003 invasion that topped Saddam Hussein. More than 4,000 Americans and an estimated 115,000 Iraqis died in the invasion and the years of insurgency and sectarian warfare that followed.

A Sunni who was originally barred from running because of allegations that he supported Hussein's Baath Party, al-Mutlaq said he has no authority within the government.

He said al-Maliki has flouted the power-sharing deal's provisions by refusing to name permanent ministers to lead the defense and interior ministries, which concentrates control over the military and police in the prime minister's hands.

He said U.S. officials, who brokered the power-sharing deal, either "don't know anything in Iraq and they don't know what is happening in Iraq, or because they don't want to admit the reality in Iraq, the failure in Iraq, the failure of this political process that they set in Iraq."

Along with Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds are a major player in Iraqi politics.

Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of parliament, said lawmakers discussed the Iraqiya move on Saturday and said it reflects "a level of mistrust between the blocs, the government, Iraqiya and others.

"The problem is that Maliki isn't sharing any security decisions with Iraqiya, he doesn't trust them and this is a big problem," he said. "Power-sharing was never power-sharing. We are in a government of conflict. Power-sharing was never successful.

"The Kurds don't want to take sides, we want them (Iraqiya and State of Law Alliance) to get together to solve their problems."

He is worried that the problem could morph into fighting between Sunnis and Shiites or violence against the government.

"This isn't just political," he said. "It's sectarian."

How Maliki and Iran Outsmarted the US on Troop Withdrawal

Antiwar.com,

17 December, 2011

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s suggestion that the end of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq is part of a U.S. military success story ignores the fact that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military had planned to maintain a semi-permanent military presence in Iraq.

The real story behind the U.S. withdrawal is how a clever strategy of deception and diplomacy adopted by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in cooperation with Iran outmaneuvered Bush and the U.S. military leadership and got the United States to sign the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement. 

A central element of the Maliki-Iran strategy was the common interest that Maliki, Iran and anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr shared in ending the U.S. occupation, despite their differences over other issues. 

Maliki needed Sadr’s support, which was initially based on Maliki’s commitment to obtain a time schedule for U.S. troops’ withdrawal from Iraq. 

In early June 2006, a draft national reconciliation plan that circulated among Iraqi political groups included agreement on "a time schedule to pull out the troops from Iraq" along with the build-up of Iraqi military forces. But after a quick trip to Baghdad, Bush rejected the idea of a withdrawal timetable. 

Maliki’s national security adviser Mowaffak Al-Rubaei revealed in a Washington Post op-ed that Maliki wanted foreign troops reduced by more than 30,000 to under 100,000 by the end of 2006 and withdrawal of "most of the remaining troops" by end of the 2007. 

When the full text of the reconciliation plan was published Jun. 25, 2006, however, the commitment to a withdrawal timetable was missing. 

In June 2007, senior Bush administration officials began leaking to reporters plans for maintaining what The New York Times described as "a near-permanent presence" in Iraq, which would involve control of four major bases. 

Maliki immediately sent Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari to Washington to dangle the bait of an agreement on troops before then Vice President Dick Cheney. 

As recounted in Linda Robinson’s "Tell Me How This Ends", Zebari urged Cheney to begin negotiating the U.S. military presence in order to reduce the odds of an abrupt withdrawal that would play into the hands of the Iranians. 

In a meeting with then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in September 2007, National Security Adviser Rubaie said Maliki wanted a "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) that would allow U.S. forces to remain but would "eliminate the irritants that are apparent violations of Iraqi sovereignty", according Bob Woodward’s "The War Within". 

Maliki’s national security adviser was also seeking to protect the Mahdi Army from U.S. military plans to target it for major attacks. Meeting Bush’s coordinator for the Iraq War, Douglas Lute, Rubaie said it was better for Iraqi security forces to take on Sadr’s militias than for U.S. Special Forces to do so. 

He explained to the Baker-Hamilton Commission that Sadr’s use of military force was not a problem for Maliki, because Sadr was still part of the government. 

Publicly, the Maliki government continued to assure the Bush administration it could count on a long-term military presence. Asked by NBC’s Richard Engel on Jan. 24, 2008 if the agreement would provide long-term U.S. bases in Iraq, Zebari said, "This is an agreement of enduring military support. The soldiers are going to have to stay someplace. They can’t stay in the air." 

Confident that it was going to get a South Korea-style SOFA, the Bush administration gave the Iraqi government a draft on Mar. 7, 2008 that provided for no limit on the number of U.S. troops or the duration of their presence. Nor did it give Iraq any control over U.S. military operations. 

But Maliki had a surprise in store for Washington. 

A series of dramatic moves by Maliki and Iran over the next few months showed that there had been an explicit understanding between the two governments to prevent the U.S. military from launching major operations against the Mahdi Army and to reach an agreement with Sadr on ending the Mahdi Army’s role in return for assurances that Maliki would demand the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces. 

In mid-March 2007, Maliki ignored pressure from a personal visit by Cheney to cooperate in taking down the Mahdi Army and instead abruptly vetoed U.S. military plans for a major operation against the Mahdi Army in Basra. Maliki ordered an Iraqi army assault on the dug-in Sadrist forces. 

Predictably, the operation ran into trouble, and within days, Iraqi officials had asked General Suleimani to intervene and negotiate a cease fire with Sadr, who agreed, although his troops were far from defeated. 

A few weeks later, Maliki again prevented the United States from launching its biggest campaign yet against the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. And again, Suleimani was brought in to work out a deal with Sadr allowing government troops to patrol in the former Mahdi Army stronghold. 

There was subtext to Suleimani’s interventions. Just as Suleimani was negotiating the Basra cease fire with Sadr, a website associated with former IRGC Commander Mohsen Rezai said Iran opposed actions by "hard-line clans" that "only weaken the government and people of Iraq and give a pretext to its occupiers". 

In the days that followed that agreement, Iranian state news media portrayed the Iraqi crackdown in Basra as being against illegal and "criminal" forces. 

The timing of each political diplomatic move by Maliki appears to have been determined in discussions between Maliki and top Iranian officials. 

Just two days after returning from a visit to Tehran in June 2008, Maliki complained publicly about U.S. demands for indefinite access to military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private contractors. 

In July, he revealed that his government was demanding the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops on a timetable. 

The Bush administration was in a state of shock. From July to October, it pretended that it could simply refuse to accept the withdrawal demand, while trying vainly to pressure Maliki to back down. 

In the end, however, Bush administration officials realized that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who was then far ahead of Republican John McCain in polls, would accept the same or an even faster timetable for withdrawal. In October, Bush decided to sign the draft agreement pledging withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2011. 

The ambitious plans of the U.S. military to use Iraq to dominate the Middle East militarily and politically had been foiled by the very regime the United States had installed, and the officials behind the U.S. scheme, had been clueless about what was happening until it was too late.