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2 Odd bedfellows: Bush woos Shi'ite
leader By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Fifty-seven years ago, US
president Harry Truman authorized the newly
created Central Intelligence Agency to carry out
its first overseas operation in Syria. As a
result, the CIA engineered a coup in Damascus that
brought an unstable yet highly ambitious officer,
General Husni al-Za'im, to power in March 1949.
Shortly after bringing him to power, the
US military attache in Syria advised Za'im to
establish contact with Truman by sending
him
a signed photograph as a gesture of goodwill to
the United States. Za'im complied, sending a huge
portrait of himself, in full military uniform,
with medals, monocle, white gloves and military
cane in hand.
When Truman received the
package he had no clue who Husni al-Za'im was or
how the new Syrian leader looked. Reportedly, when
seeing the picture he gasped, angrily telling his
advisers that this man reminded him of Benito
Mussolini, saying: "You have brought a Mussolini
to Damascus!"
This story came to mind when
reading about President George W Bush's meeting
with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Iran-backed turbaned
cleric who leads the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
The
two men met at the White House on Monday, but in
Bush's own words they had met before during
Hakim's earlier visit to Washington, DC. It's
interesting to wonder what the president, who
prior to the war, according to advisers, did not
differentiate between Sunnis and Shi'ites, thought
of Hakim at first glance.
He probably was
shocked, like Truman before him, because Hakim did
not look, sound or act like someone who could be
an ally to the United States. It would not be
surprising if the president said: "You have
brought an ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to
Baghdad!" in reference to the leader of the
Iranian revolution of 1979.
Instead, the
US president described his Iraqi guest admiringly.
saying, "This is a man whose family suffered
unbelievable violence at the hands of the dictator
Saddam Hussein. He lost nearly 60 family members,
and yet rather than being bitter, he's involved
with helping the new government succeed."
Bush might have been uninformed about
Hakim's open call for the partitioning of Iraq and
the creation of a Shi'ite south, because he added:
"I assured him [Hakim] the United States supports
his work and the work of the prime minister [Nuri
al-Maliki] to unify the country."
What
unification? It is Hakim, after all, who has
broken the norms in Iraq and aggressively called
for partition. Unity can only be achieved, Bush
added, if the extremists are eliminated, because
they "stop the advance of this young democracy".
Does the president know that this man's
militia, the Badr Organization, is one of the
strongest armed groups in Iraq, with an estimated
10,000 warriors, causing much of the inter-Iraqi
fighting? After all, Michael Hayden, the director
of the CIA, had only recently said that only 3.5%
of the Iraqi insurgency was composed of Sunni
members of al-Qaeda.
The Sunni tribesmen
carrying arms, many of whom are former Ba'athists,
are "in the low tens of thousands", Hayden said.
This means the rest are Shi'ite. It means the rest
are Badr, and the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr.
But of course Bush knows whom he is
dealing with, making Hakim's second visit to
Washington very important. The State Department,
after all, had put forward a proposal earlier in
the week calling on the White House to abandon
reconciliation efforts with the Sunnis and instead
give priority to the Shi'ites and Kurds. The
proposal, part of a much-needed review of Iraq
policy, argues that when the US troops came to
Iraq they initially embraced and collaborated with
the Shi'ites, and deliberately alienated the
Sunnis.
Part of that was because the
Sunnis could not be trusted, since they were
overwhelmingly loyal to Saddam and feared Iranian
meddling and Shi'ite influence in the post-Saddam
order. The Sunnis knew that the Shi'ites were
ambitious - and had been wronged for many years in
Iraqi politics. They were now getting the upper
hand in Iraqi politics. They were large in
numbers. They had the backing of Iran - and a
taste for vengeance.
The US-Shi'ite
honeymoon in Iraq worked at first but created a
snowballing Sunni insurgency that was supported by
outside forces, and financed and trained either by
former Ba'athists or members of al-Qaeda who
infiltrated Iraq. It also led to a smaller Shi'ite
insurgency, led by Muqtada. Pretty soon, the US
realized that the Iraqi Shi'ites had feigned their
love for the United States and, shortly after the
Americans toppled and arrested Saddam, by December
2003, the Shi'ites began calling on the US to
leave.
To contain the Sunni insurgency,
the US tried to bring the Sunnis into power in
December 2005-January 2006, to let them share
responsibility for security - and be rewarded
politically for it. This also did not work, and
matters erupted once again when the holy Shi'ite
shrine in Samarra was attacked in February. Since
then a chaotic, unorganized, and highly sectarian
madness has taken over Iraq, with Sunnis and
Shi'ites fighting each other daily, leading to the
death of more than 3,000 Iraqis per month.
In looking back, the US realizes that it
has failed to appease both the Sunnis and the
Shi'ites. It only has the Kurds, who are always a
minority in Iraqi politics. To return to the
relatively calm period of March-December 2003,
when the Shi'ites were on America's side, the
White House now has decided to change course and
adopt what has been labeled the "80% solution",
based on a recent State Department study by Philip
D Zelikow, a man best known for being the
executive director of the 9-11 Commission.
Since the Sunnis are no more than 20% of
Iraq's population, and since the Sunni fighters of
al-Qaeda are no more than 3.5% (1,400 men out of a
total of 40,000 insurgents), the US had decided to
concentrate on the remaining 80% of Iraqi society:
the Shi'ites (and Kurds). This proposal challenges
everything Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad has
been trying to do. Khalilzad, after all, was
architect of a plan on appeasing the Iraqi Sunnis
to pressure them into abandoning support for
former Ba'athists and al-Qaeda.
If
Zelikow's plan is approved - which seems likely
with the welcoming of Hakim to the White House -
it will reverse all of Khalilzad's diplomatic
efforts with the Sunnis. Among other things he had
called on Prime Minister Maliki to appoint a Sunni
as minister of defense and replace the anti-Sunni
former interior
