The search for an Iraqi
kingmaker By Iason
Athanasiadis
TEHRAN - Iraqi Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki must be feeling like a man caught
in an Iraqi version of Groundhog Day
, the Hollywood film in which US actor Bill
Murray endlessly relives the same day.
Just eight
months ago he was held up by the Bush White House
as Iraq's great hope for security and stability,
after predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari was judged to
have outlived his usefulness and was
unceremoniously shunted to the side. These days
Maliki is
said
to be livid at the Bush administration's efforts
to be rid of him. April was a time of rosy
dawns and wishful optimism as Maliki stepped up to
claim the premiership after Jaafari had been
overcome by a concerted barrage from the US, the
Kurds and the Sunnis. Even Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice descended on Baghdad's
high-security Green Zone to fete Maliki as
Washington's new man in Iraq. But even as she sat
opposite the retiring academic who spent over two
decades in exile in Syria, there was a noticeable
lack of chemistry between the two.
After a
meeting with US President George W Bush in Amman
last week that was reportedly as devoid in good
vibes as his encounter with Rice, Maliki was
excoriated in a private memo by Stephen Hadley,
the US national security adviser.
"His
intentions seem good when he talks with
Americans," noted the schoolmasterish Hadley in a
report leaked to the press, before slamming him as
either "ignorant of what is going on,
misrepresenting his intentions, or that his
capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his
good intentions into action".
The rapidity
of Maliki's fall from grace can only be matched by
Iraq's dizzying descent into bloody chaos. His
inability to stem the fighting and occasional
alliance with overtly anti-American forces has
been the chief cause of his transformation from
being a Bush administration poster boy into
becoming the target of a campaign of whispers
intended to culminate in his imminent unseating.
"The failure of the government has forced
us into this [talks] in the hope that it can
provide a solution," said Omar Abdul-Sattar, a
lawmaker from the Iraqi Islamic Party led by Sunni
politician Tareq al-Hashemi.
The talks are
aimed at forming a new parliamentary bloc that
will likely exclude supporters of Shi'ite cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a vehement opponent of the
US military presence. It would be led by senior
Shi'ite politician Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI), who met with Bush last week in
Washington. Hakim, however, is unlikely to be the
next prime minister, preferring the role of
powerbroker and promoting Shi'ite Vice President
Adel Abdel Mahdi to the position. "Hakim's
visit to the US to ask for support can be seen as
a desperate attempt to ward off the impending coup
d'etat," said Niki Akhavan, a US-based political
analyst of Iranian descent. "Given that Iran's
Supreme Leader [Ali al-]Khamenei recently
reiterated that the withdrawal of US troops from
Iraq was necessary, Hakim's visit and request for
a continuing US presence indicates a possible
split between him and his former supporters in
Iran."
Apparently hopeless The
Bush administration is fighting a desperate
political rear-guard action in a bid to moderate
the escalating violence in Iraq. Despite that,
December is already shaping up to be one of the
costliest months of the occupation for US troops,
with 51 killed in the first 11 days. Another five
were killed on Tuesday in action across Iraq,
bringing the total US dead to at least 2,939 since
the war began in 2003.
At a Gulf
Cooperation Council meeting in Kuwait last week, a
senior unnamed US State Department official told
the audience that the situation in Iraq was
"desperate" and must be changed. He added that
Washington would agree to bilateral talks with
Tehran if Iran stopped enriching uranium.
After talks in Washington on Tuesday with
Tareq, Bush announced that he would postpone
declaring a new approach to the Iraq war until the
new year.
The talk with one of Iraq's most
senior Sunni politicians came a few days after it
was publicized that secret talks between senior
American officials and leaders of the Iraqi
insurgency collapsed in April. According to an
article in the London Sunday Times, the meetings
between US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad and
three representatives of the main groups in the
insurgency were brokered by secular Shi'ite
politician and former prime minister Iyad Allawi,
but broke down after the Americans revealed that
they were considering negotiating with the
Iranians. The majority Sunni insurgency considers
the Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Iran one of its
sworn enemies.
Closer and closer to
Iran Iran remains the great untapped power
looming over the Iraqi civil war. The travails of
the Iraqi government underscore the absence of a
central force that can convince the warring
factions to lay down their weapons for the common
good. But bringing Iran in is no all-around
panacea. While the recent Iraq Study Group (ISG)
Report recommended seeking Iran's help in
stabilizing Iraq, there have been hints from Sunni
powerhouse Saudi Arabia that there would be
unpleasant repercussions in the event that Iran
was officially invited into Iraq.
Hakim's
unexpected announcement last month that US troops
should not leave Iraq just yet flies in the face
of utterances from his erstwhile ally Tehran that
the US should withdraw immediately. It also comes
at a time when a broad coalition is set to
announce the formation of a National Salvation
Dialogue Front led by Sunni politician Saleh
al-Mutlaq, the National Iraqi List led by Allawi,
the Reconciliation and Liberation Front led by
Sunni lawmaker Meshaan al-Juburi, and the Muqtada
movement.
"There is a lot of silence [in
Iran] on the SCIRI's refusal to call for a
withdrawal timetable," said Akhavan, the analyst.
"That the Iranians have made no public statements
directly critiquing Hakim could either mean that
they are trying to save face and not let on the
appearance of a rift, or they are looking the
other way because they know - like Hakim knows -
that the current Iraqi government is facing an
existential threat and that, ironically, without
US support the pro-Iranian government will fall
apart."
With Hakim maintaining
particularly close ties with Tehran and his
movement said to be deeply penetrated by Iran's
Revolutionary Guard, it is most likely that any
rift is short-lived or merely diplomatic footwork
in preparation of talks between Washington and
Tehran.
"Given how intimate Hakim is with
Iran's ruling clerics, Bush's talk with him, while
he refuses the ISG's recommendations to talk with
Iran, is spectacular," said Mahmoud Sadri, an
Iranian sociologist and current-affairs
specialist. "It is not six degrees of separation
between Bush and Khamenei now. It is one and a
solid one at that," he said in reference to Hakim
being in the middle between Bush and Khamenei.
Iason Athanasiadis is an
Iran-based correspondent.
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2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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