Remember Iraq? It was in the news for a while. You know,
it's that country in the Middle East the U.S. was hoodwinked into
invading in 2003. Not yet? Oh, come on. It's the war where some
4,400 Americans were killed, over 30,000 injured, some 700,000 Iraqis
were killed and then we found out there was no reason to invade it
after all. It's that war we spent some trillion dollars that we
couldn't afford.
Anyway, enough about ancient
history. Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is in Washington this week to
meet with President Obama and assure the Administration everything is
going swimmingly in Iraq. Sam Parker has a good article at Foreign Policy about the difference a couple of years can make.
When
Mr. Maliki last visited Washington in 2006, he was tenuously hanging
onto power as his country was going to shit. Meeting with then George
W. Bush, whose own presidential legacy was dangling by a thread, Maliki
somehow cajoled the Mr. Bush into pledging his continued support for
the Maliki government.
And Prime Minister Maliki has
flourished in the last three years. Taking advantage of the U.S.
financed Sunni Awakening, the near completion of ethnic cleansing,
eliminating political enemies with U.S. assistance, and flooding
Baghdad with American troops, Mr. Maliki has consolidated power and now
is the unquestionable big gun in Iraq.
From Sam Parker's article:
Over
the course of 2008, Maliki began pushing away the members of his own
governing coalition, the Kurds and ISCI. He not only challenged them
rhetorically and sought to claim the credit for Iraq's security
improvement, but also began to centralize more control of the
government into his own hands. For example, he subverted the civilian
ministries responsible for security and intervened directly in security
matters himself, while working to secure the appointment of officers
loyal to him in the security forces. Moreover, he used the resources
available to his office to cultivate the indigenous support base he had
previously lacked. He used state funds for "reconciliation" efforts,
most notably the formation of "tribal support councils" whose
ostensible purpose was to bring Iraqi tribes into the government fold
but also were a means of giving funds to political supporters. The man
who in 2006 had been derided for his weakness by late 2008 was being
called a "strongman" in the international press, and Maliki's political
opponents and some foreign analysts began to express concerns about a
return to authoritarian government in Iraq.
Mr. Maliki's visit to Washington this week is apparently to discuss a long term, post SOFA
Iraq/U.S. relationship. Lord knows our attention span is short, so
Maliki needs to work fast before Americans come to view Iraq as just
another Middle East oligarchy with a leader that sometimes seems a
little like that other guy....what was his name? Saddam something...
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