Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, postponed a meeting in Jordan with United States President George Bush on Wednesday after a leaked White House memo revealed deep US misgivings about al-Maliki’s willingness or ability to curb sectarian violence.
The 12-hour delay was officially to allow Bush the chance to have a bilateral meeting with the host, Jordan’s King Abdullah, but White House officials were forced to assure al-Maliki that he still had the US president’s confidence.
The memo — leaked to the New York Times and confirmed as accurate by administration officials — exposed a relationship of mutual dependence clouded by distrust and strained by the steadily escalating civil war inside Iraq.
A bipartisan US commission, the Iraq Study Group, said it will deliver a report on the US’s remaining options next Wednesday, but the Bush administration is looking for even more immediate answers as it struggles to contain a dire situation that it is getting worse by the day.
Readiness
The memo, from the US National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, to the president, questions al-Maliki’s readiness to curb the radical Shi’ite militias responsible for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Sunnis in the Iraqi capital.
Writing on November 8, a week after meeting the Iraqi prime minister, Hadley argued the ”reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests al-Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not sufficient to turn his good intentions into action”.
White House spokesperson Tony Snow insisted that ”the president has confidence in prime minister al-Maliki”. A senior administration official argued that Hadley had simply been listing all the logical possibilities for the prime minister’s actions and that Bush personally is ”convinced of prime minister al-Maliki’s determination and good intentions”, but what the Iraqi leader lacked was the capacity to carry out those intentions.
In the memo Hadley suggested ways the US could make al-Maliki more independent of Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shi’ite cleric and warlord who on Wednesday flexed his political muscle by withdrawing his six ministers from al-Maliki’s coalition in protest against the meeting with Bush, threatening the government’s survival.
One of the options Hadley proposed was for Washington to ”consider monetary support” to groups in return for backing al-Maliki, if the prime minister breaks from his Shi’ite sectarian base and creates a broader-based secular coalition. It might also be necessary to boost troop levels in Baghdad to fill a ”four-brigade gap” there because the expected new Iraqi troops had failed to materialise. A US army brigade is about 3 000 strong.
On Wednesday the Pentagon said it was moving three battalions (2 000 to 3 000 soldiers) to Baghdad from elsewhere in the country. ABC News reported that the US might pull its 20 000 marines out of the violent, mostly Sunni, Anbar province, partly to help reinforce the effort to curb the sectarian conflict in Baghdad, which claimed at least 52 more Iraqi lives on Wednesday. But the chairperson of the US joint chiefs of staff, General Peter Pace, said there was no ”immediate” plan to turn over Anbar to Iraqi forces.
Civil war
The Bush administration, concerned at the dwindling public support for the war at home, denies that the bloodshed amounts to a civil war, though on Wednesday its former secretary of state, Colin Powell, said world leaders should face the ”reality” of civil war.
The Hadley memo listed actions that al-Maliki could take to heal Iraq’s sectarian divide. Those included providing better services to Sunni areas, bringing to justice any members of al-Sadr’s Mehdi army that do not renounce violence, and announcing an overhaul of his personal staff so ”it reflects the face of Iraq”. In return, the US should continue to target al-Qaeda and other Sunni insurgent groups, to help convince Shi’ite Muslims that they do not need the Mehdi army for their security.
The memo said the US should help al-Maliki to form a new political base drawn from moderate politicians from all Iraq’s ethnic communities, as a substitute for ”his current narrow reliance on Shi’ite actors”. Creating that new base might require ”monetary support to moderate groups that have been seeking to break with larger, more sectarian parties”.
On the diplomatic front, the memo recommended that the US ask Saudi Arabia ”to cut off any public or private funding to insurgents or death squads from the region and lean on Syria to terminate its support for Ba’athist and insurgent leaders”. Such Saudi gestures should be linked to ”other areas in which Saudi Arabia wants to see US action” — an apparent reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In a sign that Bush may already have taken this advice, Vice-President Dick Cheney visited Riyadh for talks with the Saudi government on Saturday, and the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was due to visit the West Bank on Thursday.
Hadley warned that pushing al-Maliki to break with his Shi’ite base without bolstering his authority ”could force him to failure”, possibly triggering his removal by Iraq’s Parliament. Without sufficient support, he argued, a move against the Mehdi army could cause elements of the Iraqi security forces to fracture and lead to major Shi’ite disturbances in the south. — Guardian Unlimited Â