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US has ignored seven clear pointers to failure

Bronwen Maddox: World Briefing
The Times
January 12, 2007

President Bush’s “surge” assumes that the Iraqi Government shares his goals, and that given a bit of help with security and a bit more time, they will get there together. That is wrong.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, is not quite the well-meaning but ineffective figure portrayed in Bush’s plan. He has done at least seven things in the past six months which show that he plans to help Shias to secure control of every part of government and has no notion of sharing power with Sunnis.

* Just before Christmas, his Government invited several Iranian officials to Baghdad, to the anger of the US, which arrested them.

* Al-Maliki pressed ahead with Saddam Hussein’s execution over the new year despite US requests to slow down the process until legal questions had been answered.

* In November, al-Maliki ordered US forces to lift roadblocks they had put in place to try to track down a missing US soldier.

* On October 24, when Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, and General George Casey, the coalition commander, announced (with Bush’s backing) a new “timetable” for quelling the violence, al-Maliki denied that he had signed up to any such plan, a public rebuff to the US. Iraq was sovereign, he said, and no one was going to dictate timetables (nor does Bush’s plan this week venture to put dates on its targets for the Iraqi Government).

* On October 25, US and Iraqi forces raided Sadr City, the stronghold of the militia led by the radical Shia Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, whom the US blames for persecuting Sunnis and destabilising Iraq. Al-Maliki disavowed the operation, saying he had not been consulted and insisting “that it will not be repeated”.

* When US forces embedded with Iraqi forces have urged them to crack down on the Shia militias and to prevent the slaughter of Sunnis, al-Maliki has overruled them.

* During Israel’s attack on Lebanon in the summer, al-Maliki condemned the Israeli action and arranged a high-profile meeting in Tehran with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian President, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

These are not the actions of a man who shares the US goal of creating a multi-ethnic Iraq, in which Sunnis are represented and their rights protected.

Al-Maliki may not even tolerate the presence of more US troops for long, although he spared Bush the humiliation this week of saying so outright. But leading Shias, close to al-Maliki and his sometime rival Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, have openly opposed the notion of a “surge”, as an encroachment into Iraqi sovereignty. There lies the rub. They have taken the US at its word — that it has transferred sovereignty to Iraq’s elected leaders, and is staying only to advise and help. Let us run our country, then, and tell the US how to help, is their answer. But after years of suppression by the Sunni elite, the leaders of the Shia majority seem in little mood to make concessions to a minority, although they go through the motions of acknowledging the principle in their pledges to the US.

Yet the al-Maliki Government has ignored every target the US set it: last year, this summer, and again in October. The US asked it to put into action a plan for sharing oil revenues across the country, and cracking down on militias, both to help Sunnis; it has done neither.

This week Bush asked it for the same things, once more. It is hard to see why it will oblige, when it has felt no need to do so before.

Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2543858,00.html [with comments]