How the Bush Administration Underestimated Nouri al-Maliki

WASHINGTON, Sep 1 (IPS) -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signaled last week that that all U.S. troops -- including those with non-combat functions -- must be out of the country by the end of 2011 under the agreement he is negotiating with the George W. Bush administration.

That pronouncement, along with other moves indicating that the Iraqi position was hardening rather than preparing for a compromise, appeared to doom the Bush administration's plan to leave tens of thousands of military support personnel in Iraq indefinitely. The new Iraqi moves raise the obvious question of how a leader who was considered a safe U.S. client could have defied his patron on such a central U.S. strategic interest.

Al-Maliki declared Aug. 25 that the U.S. had agreed that "no foreign soldiers will be in Iraq after 2011". A Shiite legislator and al-Maliki ally, Ali al-Adeeb, told the Washington Post that only the Iraqi government had the authority under the agreement to decide whether conditions were conducive to a complete withdrawal. He added that the Iraqi government "could ask the Americans to withdraw before 2011 if we wish."

It was also reported that al-Maliki has replaced his negotiating team with three of his closest advisers.

These moves blindsided the Bush administration, which had been telling reporters that a favorable agreement was close. The Washington Post reported Aug. 22 and again Aug. 26 that the agreement on withdrawal would be "conditions-based" and would allow the United States to keep tens of thousands of non-combat troops in the country after 2011.

The administration had assumed going into the negotiations that al-Maliki would remain a U.S. client for a few years, because of the Iraqi government's dependence on the U.S. military to build a largely Shiite Iraqi army and police force and defeat the main insurgent threats to his regime.

But that dependence has diminished dramatically over the past two years as Iraqi security forces continued to grow, the Sunni insurgents found refuge under U.S. auspices and the Shiites succeeded in largely eliminating Sunni political-military power from the Baghdad area. As a result, the inherent conflicts between U.S. interests and those of the Shiite regime have been become more evident.

Contrary to the administration's claims that it was helping the regime remain independent of Iran, al-Maliki was far closer to Tehran than to Washington from the beginning. As a team of McClatchy newspaper reporters revealed last April, the choice of al-Maliki as prime minister was the direct result of the mediation by Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force, in the negotiations within the coalition that had won the December 2005 parliamentary election.

Washington didn't learn that Suleimani had slipped into the Green Zone until later, according to the McClatchy report.

Al-Maliki has hardly hidden his opposition to U.S. ambitions to maintain a major long-term role in Iraq. One of his first moves was to propose negotiating a timetable for complete U.S. withdrawal with the Sunni insurgents. He soon clashed with U.S. officials over their determination to launch a campaign against Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Sadr had been a key political ally of al-Maliki, and the Mahdi Army was an important asset in a broader Shiite campaign to eliminate Sunni political-military power in Baghdad.

The Iraqi leader angered U.S. officials in late October 2006 by intervening to call off a U.S.-Iraqi cordon and search operation against the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. When Bush met with al-Maliki in Amman, Jordan on Nov. 30, 2006, to discuss a possible U.S. troop increase, he had hoped to get approval for U.S. troops to occupy Sadr City. As Michael Gordon revealed in his Aug. 31 account of Bush policymaking on the surge, however, al-Maliki told Bush he wanted U.S. troops to stay out of the center of the capital.