[R-G] Why Its Iraqi "Client" Blocked U.S. Long-Term Presence

[Anthony Fenton]

POLITICS:  Why Its Iraqi "Client" Blocked U.S. Long-Term Presence
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43753

WASHINGTON, Sep 1 (IPS) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki  
signaled last week that that all U.S. troops -- including those with  
non-combat functions -- must be out of the country by the end of 2011  
under the agreement he is negotiating with the George W. Bush  
administration.

That pronouncement, along with other moves indicating that the Iraqi  
position was hardening rather than preparing for a compromise,  
appeared to doom the Bush administration's plan to leave tens of  
thousands of military support personnel in Iraq indefinitely. The new  
Iraqi moves raise the obvious question of how a leader who was  
considered a safe U.S. client could have defied his patron on such a  
central U.S. strategic interest.

Al-Maliki declared Aug. 25 that the U.S. had agreed that "no foreign  
soldiers will be in Iraq after 2011". A Shiite legislator and al- 
Maliki ally, Ali al-Adeeb, told the Washington Post that only the  
Iraqi government had the authority under the agreement to decide  
whether conditions were conducive to a complete withdrawal. He added  
that the Iraqi government "could ask the Americans to withdraw before  
2011 if we wish."

It was also reported that al-Maliki has replaced his negotiating team  
with three of his closest advisers.

These moves blindsided the Bush administration, which had been telling  
reporters that a favourable agreement was close. The Washington Post  
reported Aug. 22 and again Aug. 26 that the agreement on withdrawal  
would be "conditions-based" and would allow the United States to keep  
tens of thousands of non-combat troops in the country after 2011.

The administration had assumed going into the negotiations that al- 
Maliki would remain a U.S. client for a few years, because of the  
Iraqi government's dependence on the U.S. military to build a largely  
Shiite Iraqi army and police force and defeat the main insurgent  
threats to his regime.

But that dependence has diminished dramatically over the past two  
years as Iraqi security forces continued to grow, the Sunni insurgents  
found refuge under U.S. auspices and the Shiites succeeded in largely  
eliminating Sunni political-military power from the Baghdad area. As a  
result, the inherent conflicts between U.S. interests and those of the  
Shiite regime have been become more evident.

Contrary to the administration's claims that it was helping the regime  
remain independent of Iran, al-Maliki was far closer to Tehran than to  
Washington from the beginning. As a team of McClatchy newspaper  
reporters revealed last April, the choice of al-Maliki as prime  
minister was the direct result of the mediation by Gen. Qassem  
Suleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods  
Force, in the negotiations within the coalition that had won the  
December 2005 parliamentary election.

Washington didn't learn that Suleimani had slipped into the green zone  
until later, according to the McClatchy report.

Al-Maliki has hardly hidden his opposition to U.S. ambitions to  
maintain a major long-term role in Iraq. One of his first moves was to  
propose negotiating a timetable for complete U.S. withdrawal with the  
Sunni insurgents. He soon clashed with U.S. officials over their  
determination to launch a campaign against Shiite cleric Moqtada al- 
Sadr's Mahdi Army. Sadr had been a key political ally of al-Maliki,  
and the Mahdi Army was an important asset in a broader Shiite campaign  
to eliminate Sunni political-military power in Baghdad.

The Iraqi leader angered U.S. officials in late October 2006 by  
intervening to call off a U.S.-Iraqi cordon and search operation  
against the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. When Bush met with al-Maliki in  
Amman, Jordan on Nov. 30, 2006, to discuss a possible U.S. troop  
increase, he had hoped to get approval for U.S. troops to occupy Sadr  
City. As Michael Gordon revealed in his Aug. 31 account of Bush  
policymaking on the surge, however, al-Maliki told Bush he wanted U.S.  
troops to stay out of the centre of the capital.

In the end, al-Maliki and the U.S. command reached a compromise on a  
carefully conditioned U.S. occupation of Sadr City. But al-Maliki  
continued to maintain ties with the Sadrists.

In 2007, Gen. David Petraeus's project to form Sunni militias, mostly  
from former armed resistance veterans, became a new source of tension  
between the Bush administration and al-Maliki. An associate of al- 
Maliki told Associated Press in July 2007 that he once threatened in a  
discussion with President Bush to counter the arming of Sunnis by  
arming Shiite militias. The Iraqi leader halted progress on political  
concessions to the Sunni community.

As the U.S. command turned its attention increasingly to attacking the  
Mahdi Army, the Bush administration began talking in June 2007 about a  
long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq, based on the "Korean model".  
Al-Maliki's responded by declaring that U.S. troops should leave and  
turn over security to Iraqi forces.

In August, Bush publicly distanced himself from al-Maliki, apparently  
hoping he would be replaced by a more cooperative figure.

In late August, the Sadrists were fighting against both U.S. troops in  
Baghdad and security forces loyal to the pro-Iranian Supreme Iraqi  
Islamic Council in the south. With al-Maliki's obvious encouragement,  
Iran intervened to arrange the first of a series of accommodations  
between its Iraqi clients and Sadr. On Aug. 26, 2007 the Iranian  
foreign ministry spokesman, asked why nothing had been done to arrange  
"reconciliation" between the two Iraqi groups, said Iran "always used  
its influence to create unity between the different groups in Iraq".

Three days later, Sadr announced a unilateral ceasefire. The main  
beneficiary of the ceasefire, which ended attacks on the green zone  
and intra-Shiite fighting, was the al-Maliki regime, and Iraqi  
officials credited Iranian policy for having made it happen.

The Mar. 7 U.S. draft of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and the  
U.S. military drive in Shiite territory brought the conflict of  
interests between the al-Maliki regime and the Bush administration to  
a head in 2008. In mid-March, Al-Maliki rejected a Petraeus plan for a  
massive joint operation against the Sadrists in Basra, which would  
have increased Iraqi dependence on U.S. troops.

Instead, al-Maliki launched his own operation in Basra that was  
planned to last only a few days. Then, in a move that appears to have  
been prearranged with Suleimani, Iraqi officials were dispatched to  
Iran to get Suleimani's help in mediating a peace agreement with Sadr.

The result was a Sadrist retreat from Basra, even though Iraqi  
security forces had not been able to cope with the Mahdi Army  
resistance. That headed off a major U.S. troop presence in the Shiite  
south and strengthened al-Maliki's position in negotiations with  
Washington.

The Basra agreement set the stage for the subsequent accord between al- 
Maliki and Sadr, again reached with Iranian mediation, for a ceasefire  
in Sadr City on May 12. The agreement prevented the U.S. command from  
getting the large-scale U.S. campaign in Sadr City for which it had  
been pushing for more than a year.

The carefully calculating Sadr had been convinced to trade short-term  
military success for the prospect of a U.S. military retreat.

Al-Maliki began pushing for "significant changes" in the SOFA only  
after the May agreement, but he was only returning to the position he  
had embraced two years earlier.

This al-Maliki record of opposition to U.S. political-military  
interests apparently failed to shake the Bush administration's belief  
that he would yield to U.S. demands in the end. That faith appears to  
reflect the official military triumphalism associated with Gen. David  
Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy -- a residual faith in the power  
of the U.S. military's presence in Iraq to sweep away all local  
obstacles to U.S. victory.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist  
specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition  
of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the  
Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

(END/2008)