Maliki's doubts threaten US troop
plan By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has
given his approval to a Pentagon plan to station
United States combat troops in Iraq beyond 2011,
provided that Iraqi Premier Nuri al-Maliki
officially requests it, according to US and Iraqi
sources.
But both US and Iraqi officials
acknowledge that Maliki may now be reluctant to
make the official request. Maliki faces severe
political constraints at home, and his government
is being forced by recent moves by Saudi Arabia to
move even closer to Iran.
And it is no
longer taken for granted by US or Iraqi officials that
Maliki can survive the rising
tide of opposition through the summer.
As
early as September 2010, the White House informed
the Iraqi government that it was willing to
consider keeping between 15,000 and 20,000 troops
in Iraq, in addition to thousands of
unacknowledged Special Operations Forces. But
Obama insisted that it could only happen if Maliki
requested it, according to a senior Iraqi
intelligence official.
And the White
House, which was worried about losing support from
the Democratic Party's anti-war base as
congressional mid-term elections approached,
insisted that the acknowledged troops would have
to be put at least ostensibly under a State
Department-run security force.
Several
days after Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, the
key US strategic ally in the Middle East for 30
years, was forced by the pro-democracy movement to
resign in early February, Iraqi officials were
informed that Obama was now more convinced than
before that he could not afford to be tagged with
having "lost" Iraq, the intelligence official told
Inter Press Service (IPS).
Proponents of a
post-2011 US presence in Iraq within the Obama
administration had taken advantage of the
generally accepted view that the Iraq war was
turned around from a dismal failure into a success
in 2007-08 by the troop surge and the strategy of
General David Petraeus.
The Defense
Department officials had indicated to the Iraqis
in February that Obama was now prepared to support
the stationing of 17,000 US combat troops beyond
2011, contingent on Maliki's sending an official
letter of request to Obama, according to the Iraqi
intelligence official.
The Pentagon also
began making contingency plans for the stationing
of the 3rd Infantry Division in the tense city of
Kirkuk, according to the official.
But
since those signs of greater determination by
Obama to leave a semi-permanent military presence
in Iraq, the likelihood of Maliki's making the
official request for the troops has come
increasingly into question.
Both US and
Iraqi officials now acknowledge that Maliki's need
for Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's political
support and the degree to which Muqtada has
regained influence in the Shi'ite south - after
having lost it in mid-2008 - represent serious
political constraints on his position regarding a
possible continuation of the US troop presence.
Muqtada's calling on his followers to stay
away from a mass demonstration against Maliki's
government February 25 may have saved Maliki's
government from collapsing, the Iraqi intelligence
official told IPS.
And Muqtada continues
to oppose a US military presence in Iraq. After
returning to Iraq in January, Muqtada issued a
fiery message reaffirming that the "first
objective should be to get rid of the occupation".
"If al-Maliki were to ask for US troops,
the Sadrists would try to unseat him," said the
Iraqi intelligence official, who added that
Maliki's survival through the summer is no longer
taken for granted.
An official US source
also suggested that Maliki's government could
collapse before a decision is made on a request
for a continuing US troop presence.
But
the Saudi dispatch of combat troops to Bahrain
last month to repress the pro-democracy movement
that represented the Shi'ite majority in that
country may have made a move toward the United
States difficult, if not impossible for Maliki.
That aggressive Saudi action against the
Shi'ites of Bahrain has made it clearer that Saudi
Arabia must be regarded as Iraq's primary enemy,
according to the Iraqi intelligence official.
But it is only part of a larger problem of
Iraqi conflict with Saudi Arabia. Iraqi
intelligence has indications that the original
al-Qaeda in Iraq network is in the process of
leaving the country for Libya, but that another
organization now operating under the name of
al-Qaeda in Iraq is actually a Saudi-supported
Ba'athist paramilitary group run from Jordan by a
former high-ranking general under former Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein.
The need to
defend against Saudi infiltration of Iraq and be
fully committed on one side of the Sunni-Shi'ite
divide in the region means that Maliki has had to
move even closer to Iran.
Political unrest
in Iraq in the form of popular protests, mainly
over the failure of his government to improve
basic services to the population, has also forced
Maliki to reduce the priority his government had
previously put on military cooperation with the
US.
One indicator of Maliki's intentions
is his apparent hesitation about proceeding with
the purchase of 18 of the latest model US F-16
fighter planes. Complete with advanced
air-to-ground and air-to-air munitions, the deal
was estimated to be worth US$4.2 billion.
When the deal was officially announced
last September, the Defense Security Cooperation
Agency, the Pentagon's office for foreign arms
sales, had crowed that it would "ensure a US
military presence in Iraq for years to come".
In late January, the US command in Iraq
was so convinced that Maliki was about to sign the
agreement that it mistakenly put out a press
release announcing that the signing had already
taken place.
But after protests began in
Baghdad and Karbala in February, Iraqi government
spokesman Ali Dabbagh said the F-16 contract had
been "postponed this year". He explained that the
$900 million required as a down payment on the
F-16 deal would be spent on increasing the total
amount spent on food rations for needy people from
$3 billion to $4 billion.
Even though the
Iraqi government announced on March 1 that higher
oil prices would add $8 billion to Iraq's budget
this year, the F-16 fighter deal has nevertheless
been downgraded to 12 planes, with less
sophisticated weapons systems. The deal is now
estimated to be worth just over one-fourth of the
original, with a down payment that has shrunk to
$250 million.
But it is still far from
certain that Maliki will sign the deal, according
to the Iraqi military source, because Maliki has
decided on the building of a multi-billion-dollar
national electric power grid.
If the Iraqi
premier does not ask for US troops to remain after
the expiration of the November 2008 US-Iraq
withdrawal agreement, it will be a major blow to
the assertion made over the past three years
portraying Maliki as an ally of the United States
who wants US help in keeping Iraq out of the
Iranian sphere of influence.
The reality
is much less favorable to the rosy view of US
influence in Iraq. Press accounts have revealed
that key events in that period - including the
selection of Maliki as prime minister in 2006, the
2007 ceasefires in Basrah and Baghdad, and the
renewed political alliance between Maliki and
Muqtada in 2010 - were all brokered by General
Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Close security and political relations
between Maliki's government and Iran are based not
only on a shared past of Shi'ite activism but
continuing conflict between Shi'ite states and a
Saudi-led anti-Shi'ite coalition.
Gareth Porter is an
investigative historian and journalist
specializing in US 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.
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