America Held Hostage by Nouri al-Maliki

Spencer Ackerman:

toohotfortnr: wages of sin, we keep paying: Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki is giving powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr's forces three days to surrender in Basra, as clashes between Maliki's security forces and Sadr's Mahdi Army -- in which the U.S. intervenes on Maliki's side -- escalate. But with the U.S. happy about the now-abrogated Sadrist ceasefire, why is the U.S. military getting involved? The Washington Post isn't sure:

It was unclear why U.S. forces would take part in a broad armed challenge to Sadr and his thousands-strong militia on the eve of Petraeus's assessment, which the Bush administration has said would greatly influence its decision on whether to draw down troop levels.

Here's an answer. As long as Maliki is in the prime minister's chair, and as long as we proclaim the Iraqi government he leads to be legitimate, Maliki effectively holds us hostage.... It simply is not tenable for Petraeus to refuse a request for security assistance from the Prime Minister to deal with a radical militia.

Now, some of my Iraq-watcher friends of mine point out that this is absurd. "Sadr is, of course, a thug," they say, "but he's a nationalist. And he's far less beholden to Iran than the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq or Maliki's Da'wa Party -- both of whom we're supporting! And most importantly, Sadr remains perhaps the most popular figure in Shiite Iraq. Petraeus can do business with him. This doesn't make any sense!" And they're right. It doesn't. But as long as we sponsor the Iraqi political process -- and a Sadrist doesn't actually become premier himself -- this will keep happening....

The dangers of picking and choosing who the Iraqi premier should be outweigh any imperial temptations we may feel. We'll be just as responsible for Prime Minister Next-Up's mistakes as we are for Maliki's. And the Iraqis will never trust any leader that foreigners pick for them. In what's shaping up to be the Second Sadrist Intifada, you go to war with the prime minister you have, not the prime minister you might want.

Comments

[save_the_rustbelt]

We should have never gotten into a war where we don't know who to shoot and who to save.

No good can come of this.

[Roger Albin]

Another Viet Nam lesson forgotten. Clientage is a 2 way street and changing clients is often difficult.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/us/politics/26cnd-mccain.html?hp&pagewanted=print

March 26, 2008

McCain Says U.S. Has 'Moral Responsibility' in Iraq
By JOHN HOLUSHA

Senator John McCain made his case for continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a major foreign policy speech.

[anne]

Brad DeLong's colleague:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/print/174910/Tomgram%253A%2520%2520Mark%2520Danner%252C%2520Generals%2520Bin%2520Laden%2520and%2520Bush

March 25, 2008

Taking Stock of the War on Terror: A Defeat Only American Power Could Have Brought About
By Mark Danner

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad -- as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow -- is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the "mixed" neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to "take stock" of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look closely at its misshapen contours, we can see in the War on Terror:

Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;

Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;

Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the dark side," as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a vast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and the Straits of Gibraltar;

And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part, Virtual War -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia, and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always expanding.

Snowflakes Drifting Down on the War on Terror

President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."

Astonishing words from a world leader -- declaring that he would "rid the world of evil." Just in case anyone thought they might have misheard the sweep of the President's ambition, his National Security Strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that "the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism -- premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents." ...

[anne]

"America Held Hostage by Nouri al-Maliki"

Forgive me, but this is completely wrong; what is happening is that America is trying to engineer the destruction of Muktada al-Sadr, as Viceroy Bremer an General Sanchez had wished only to be thwarted by the Spanish. We are engineering destruction in Iraq as we have engineered destruction in Somalia through the Ethiopian occupation.

[Barkley Rosser]

It is unclear who is responsible for this campaign. I think it is probably Maliki more than the US, although the US has never liked al-Sadr because he has opposed US presence from Day One, even though he is more anti-Iran than either al-Hakim or Maliki. It would appear that the trigger is the struggle for control of Basra, which is important because that amounts to control of the revenues from the biggest location and export site for oil in all of Iraq. There has been a balance of power, but somehow the central government and the US want Sadr out of the picture.

What is really weird is that indeed most observers have said that it has been the truce declared by al-Sadr that has been responsible more than anything else besides maybe building all those walls around all those neighborhoods in Baghdad, for the reduction in deaths in recent months, supposedly due to the surge. I have seen no reports that Sadr has undone his truce. It seems his people are being attacked for no particularly good reason, sheer power grabbing, I guess. So much for his truce, I guess.