Iraqis Have Voted: Will the U.S. Be Kicked Out the Door Soon?

By Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation. Posted February 21, 2009.

But it was Maliki who muscled his way to big wins in Baghdad, Basra and other provinces in Iraq's largely Shiite south, and who blatantly used the power of the army, the police, the media and the prime minister's office to tilt the balance in his favor. Starting early in 2008, Maliki used the army to conduct a series of sweeping offensives in Basra, Maysan and Baghdad's Sadr City to break the power of Muqtada al-Sadr's movement. The offensives, which drew intensive US support, including air attacks and intelligence help, "scattered Sadr's movement to the four winds," says Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Maliki followed that up by ramming through an arbitrary and selectively enforced measure banning parties with militias from participating in the elections, which was aimed squarely at Sadr's 60,000-strong Mahdi Army. The International Crisis Group called it "a blatantly biased move in light of the fact that ISCI and the Kurdish parties both retain militias...loyal to their political masters."

Maliki didn't stop there. Step by step, he transformed the Iraqi army into a kind of private militia for the office of the prime minister, bypassing the chief of staff to appoint brigade commanders and other officers loyal to himself. He also created a pair of special operations units, the Baghdad Brigade and the Counterterrorism Task Force, that reported directly to him. And he used all three to conduct lethal operations against opponents, ruthlessly rounding up members of Sadr's movement and key leaders of the Awakening movement. Maliki's clear intent was to make sure that neither the Sunni nationalists nor the Sadrists were able to enter the election on a level playing field.

But the most decisive action launched last year by Maliki to influence the elections was the creation of lavishly funded "tribal support councils" that served as militias and as the prime minister's electoral arm. Despite protests from the nationalist opposition and his coalition partners (ISCI and the Kurds), Maliki created a slush fund to back the tribal councils. In Maysan, for instance, he set up at least seventeen separate councils, channeling hefty payoffs to tribal leaders. Payoffs were supposedly capped at $10,000 per council, but Maliki apparently spent a lot more. "If they were expecting $10,000, he gave them easily $100,000 or more, more than they dreamed of," says Alsammarae. "So they started to work for him." According to Sam Parker of the US Institute of Peace (USIP), there were rumors that as much as $100 million was funneled to Maliki supporters in suitcases.

Maliki's tactics were successful enough to guarantee that in the face of a hurricane-force anti-incumbent mood, he would survive. Indeed, he won 38 percent in Baghdad, 37 percent in Basra and came in first, in the 12-23 percent range, in six other southern provinces. It might seem as if Maliki's success was a victory for political Islam, given his origins in the fundamentalist Shiite religious movement. But not quite.

To be sure, the Dawa Party is an Islamist formation. And like ISCI -- whose political origins and militia, the Badr Brigade, can be traced to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1982 -- Maliki and his Dawa confreres spent long years of exile in Iran. But in the past year Maliki, sensing which way the winds were blowing, dropped all references to religion in his campaign, wrapping himself instead in the flag and running as a nationalist defender of Iraq. (Dawa had already broken into at least three factions, one of which was led by former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.) According to Alsammarae, Maliki winked as liquor stores, barbershops, DVD sellers and nightclubs reopened in Basra, after years during which religious Shiite militias had shut them down or burned them.

By taking a strong nationalist stand in negotiating the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), by standing against the Kurds in disputes over Kirkuk and other embattled areas, and by supporting revision of the Constitution to favor a stronger central government, Maliki made broad appeals to nationalists. Emphasizing security, he went to great lengths to portray himself as a law-and-order candidate, touting his crackdown on the Mahdi Army. "In the eyes of many Iraqis in the south, Maliki was seen as a new strongman, which they craved," says Joost Hiltermann of the Crisis Group.

As Dawa faded, Maliki built coalitions in the provinces comprising tribal leaders and other notables, often picking people with nationalist, nonreligious credentials. "Maliki was able to go into the provinces and recruit people who were actually popular at the local level," says USIP's Parker. Adds Jarrar: "It wasn't the Dawa Party that ran in these elections. It was a more diverse group of independents and secular figures, in some cases even Sunnis." As a result, Maliki sits atop a coalition, at least at the provincial level, that is far more nationalist and less religious than Maliki himself. He is at least partly beholden to a movement that won't easily tolerate his moving back toward an alliance with ISCI and the Kurds.

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Robert Dreyfuss is the author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam" (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books).

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