Petraeus hid Maliki's resistance to US troops
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - General David Petraeus, in testimony before US congressional
committees last week, portrayed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's late
March offensive in Basra as a poorly planned effort that departed from what US
officials had expected.
What Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, did not reveal is that Maliki was
deliberately upsetting a Petraeus plan to put US and British forces into Basra
for a months-long operation to eliminate the Mahdi Army from the city.
Petraeus referred to a plan for an operation to be carried out in Basra that he
and his staff had developed with the head of the Basra Operational Command,
General Mohan al-Furayji. But
Petraeus carefully dodged a question from Senator Hillary Clinton about what
resources he was planning to deploy to Basra and over what length of time.
Clinton evidently suspected that the plan envisioned the deployment of US
troops on a large scale in the Shi'ite south, despite the fact that the Iraqi
government is supposed to be responsible for security there. Petraeus responded
vaguely that it was "a phased plan over the course of a number of months during
which different actions were going to be pursued".
Reports in the British press indicated, however, that the campaign plan was
based on the assumption that British and US troops would play the central role
in an effort to roll up the Mahdi Army in Basra. The Independent reported March
21 that Furayji had publicly declared there would be a "final battle" in Basra,
probably during the summer, and that Britain had already promised to provide
military forces for the campaign. It quoted "senior government sources" as
saying that Prime Minister Gordon Brown's earlier pledge to cut the number of
British troops in the south from 4,100 to 2,500 would "almost certainly be
postponed until at least the end of the year".
Two days later, the Sunday Mirror quoted a "senior US military source" as
saying that the "coalition" would turn its attention to Basra once the "huge
operation" in Mosul against al Qaeda and nationalist Sunni insurgents was
completed, and that the US was prepared to redeploy "thousands" of US Marines
to Basra, if necessary.
This plan for a major foreign troop deployment to the south for the first time
since the US battles against the Mahdi Army in April 2004 did not sit well with
Maliki. In 2006 and 2007, he had repeatedly blocked US proposals that US and
Iraqi forces target Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Baghdad as well as in the
south.
When Vice President Dick Cheney, who had previously played the "bad cop" in the
George W Bush administration's relations with Maliki, visited Baghdad in
mid-March, one of his objectives was to get Maliki to go along with the
Petraeus plan to eliminate the commanding position of Muqtada's forces in
Basra. Maliki has told Iraqi officials that Cheney put pressure on him to go
along with the Basra operation, according one Iraqi source.
After Cheney met briefly with Maliki on March 17, he discussed the "security
situation" with Muqtada's Shi'ite rival, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the
Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which has been pushing for the destruction of
the Mahdi Army. Cheney lavished praise on Hakim, whom he ostentatiously called
"my friend", for "working so hard with the United States and with Iraq's other
leaders to advance the cause of Iraq's freedom and democracy". The signal of
the Bush administration's intentions toward Muqtada could hardly have been
clearer.
The Cheney visit apparently mobilized Maliki, but not in the way Cheney had
intended.
Four days later, when Petraeus met with Maliki's national security adviser
Mowaffak al-Rubaie to talk about the US campaign plan for Basra, Rubaie warned
Petraeus that Maliki had a different plan. Petraeus was apparently told that
the operation would last from a week to 10 days - not the several months
envisioned in the Petraeus plan.
The main point of Maliki's operation, however, was that it would exclude US
troops. As Maliki explained in an interview with CNN correspondent Nic
Robertson on April 7, he had demanded that US and British troops stay out of
Basra, "because that would give an excuse to some militant groups to say that
this is a foreign force attacking us".
Maliki thus feared that a confrontation between thousands of US and British
troops and the Mahdi Army would further inflame the feelings of Shi'ites in the
south about the occupation, with which his own regime has been so tightly
linked.
The Shi'ite south has become the most anti-occupation region in the country.
The British polling firm ORB, which has been doing opinion surveys in Iraq
since 2005, found in March that 69% of respondents in the south believed
security would improve if foreign troops were withdrawn, and only 10% believed
it would get worse.
When Maliki met with Petraeus the following morning, according to Petraeus'
spokesman, Petraeus warned against sending "a couple of brigades" into the
city, suggesting that he did not consider the scale of the operation to be
large enough. Nevertheless, when Maliki told him the decision to launch an
operation in Basra had already been made and that it would begin in three days,
Petraeus agreed to support it.
When the Basra operation became an obvious disaster, however, Washington
officials began to question Maliki's motives. On the third day of the
operation, as Bush administration officials were reassessing what they
described as "a rapidly deteriorating situation in southern Iraq", one official
told the Washington Post's Peter Baker they were comparing conspiracy theories
about why Maliki had acted so precipitously.
Although that comment was not explained, it clearly implied that Maliki was
deliberately undermining the US objective of eliminating the Mahdi Army by
using US and British troops.
Bush administration suspicions of Maliki's intentions could not have been eased
by the fact that a delegation of pro-government parties traveled to Iran to ask
the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps to negotiate a
ceasefire with the Mahdi Army. That ploy, which did result in a tenuous
ceasefire, raised the possibility that Maliki intended from the beginning that
the outcome of the Basra operation would be a new agreement that would prevent
the deployment of US and British troops to fight the Mahdi Army during the
summer.
Bush administration officials have been asserting that the most important thing
about the Basra operation is that Maliki is now convinced that Iran is really
an enemy rather than a friend. But Maliki's April 7 interview with CNN's
Robertson made it clear that he has not budged from his position that his
government's interests lie in an accord between Iran and the United States -
not in taking sides against Iran.
"We will always reject the idea of any side using Iraq as a launching pad for
its attack on others," said Maliki. "We reject Iran using Iraq to attack the
US, and at the same time we reject the idea of the US using Iraq to attack Iran
..."
Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The
paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of
Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
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