Consolidating power and pony plans

By Dave Anderson:

The Great Swopadamushas had a very good lens to look at Iraq and I think it is worth seeing what Swopa sees:

For five years now, I�ve been writing about the ability of Iraq�s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the Shiite-dominated government he shepherded into power to resist American pressure � and been right nearly every time I bet on that ability to prevail.

A year ago, when the conventional wisdom was that Iraqi prime minister Maliki�s demands for a withdrawal timeline (during negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA) were just to placate Iraqi public opinion while coming up with a way for the U.S. to stay, I wrote that Sistani�s plan since 2004 was �to use the American military as a contractor of sorts to help cement a Shiite-led government�s power, then nudge us aside when the task was more or less complete.�

I think we will see a clear example of the divergence between Maliki and the rest of Team Sistani goal set and the US goal set in the next couple of weeks. There will soon be two things that stand in contradiction to each other on the objective side.

From the Los Angeles Times,a brief report on US military intentions and activities:

Army Gen. Ray Odierno said the proposal would see U.S. troops deployed alongside Iraqi security forces and Kurdish peshmerga militiamen on the Arab-Kurdish fault line in the northern province of Nineveh, the scene of several recent high-profile bombings.  

Their goal, he said, would be to build trust between Iraqi security forces representing the Baghdad government and Kurdish militia answerable to the Kurdish regional government at a time when an increase in bombings attributed to the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq has sent tensions between the two administrations soaring.

The peshmerga are just the best organized and best dressed non-state military force that possesses local legitimacy and enough organization to be a major player with battalion and brigade sized formations that  can mass as long as they don�t get hit by the US Air Force.  The Awakening militias are another, slightly less organized but even more combat hardened group that has had two relatively quiet years to reform and re-organize out of a cell structure and towards a more formal military structure. Odierno is acknowledging these realities and hopes that the US Army can be used as peace-keepers and maintainers of a dividing line between the government of Iraq that wants to have a monopoly on violence in all of Iraq, or at least its valuable portions (screw the Western Desert) and the US backed militias. 

 

The Iraqi government that wants to act like a sovereign government and use the January elections to distract the population from its own incompetence by waving the bloody shirt against a bunch of unpopular foreigners.

 

The Washington Postreports the Iraqi government wants to use the SOFA referendum to pressure the US or at least make it look like there is a lot of pressure and that they are all that stands between the US and a return to the deluge. 

 

If Iraqi lawmakers sign off on Maliki's initiative to hold a referendum in January on the withdrawal timeline, a majority of voters could annul a standing U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, forcing the military to pull out completely by January 2011 under the terms of a previous law.

 

U.S. officials say they have no way to know how the referendum would turn out, but they worry that many Iraqis are likely to vote against the pact. Maliki billed the withdrawal of U.S. forces from urban areas at the end of June as a "great victory" for Iraqis, and his government has since markedly curbed the authority and mobility of U.S. forces.

Maliki has in the past eighteen months used the US military to beat down on all of Team Sistani�s rivals one at a time.  It happened in Anbar, it happened in Basra, it happened in Sadr City, the Iraqi forces loyal to Maliki, Dawa and SIIC/SCIRI/Badr picked fights that they could not finish until US air power, artillery and armor showed up.  The KRG is the last big regional player that has not cut a deal with Maliki on oil revenue control, and the peshmerga is still an excellent strategically defensive force.  

 

The US has been useful to him in consolidating power.  Pony plans to support non-state sanctioned and non-Team Sistani aligned militias are a threat to Maliki's consolidation.  The US is approaching functional and political irrelevancy even if it is still the most heavily armed militia in Iraq, everyone knows any arrangement that the US makes is at best a short term arrangement with absolutely no credibility behind any promises of continuation after 2011.