Recent reports indicate that the Bush administration is increasingly unhappy with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Maliki's government is four months into its tenure, and in that time it has stumbled in its efforts to provide security, economic development, and basic services. For some reason, President Bush seems to impute this to a failure of will (perhaps having been indoctrinated into the neocon Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics?), and he indicated that U.S. support hinges on how "tough" the Iraqi government is:
Mr. Bush said he wanted Iraqis to know "that the United States of America stands with them, so long as the government continues to make the tough choices necessary for peace to prevail."Considering the fact that this administration seems to equate leadership with obstinacy, these increasing criticisms aren't surprising. The administration used similar critiques when it essentially pushed out the first elected Prime Minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, calling him indecisive and weak when the reality was that the administration was terrified of his dependence upon Sadr for political support. Of course, Maliki also depends on Sadrist support, because Sadr controls the largest Shia bloc in parliament. And Maliki is faced with the thankless (and so far luckless) job of holding together political groups that have vastly disparate goals.
All this is bad enough, but the current administration seems intent on focusing on all the wrong things. Apparently the be all and end all of Maliki's tenure is whether he'll stand up to Sadr, who just happens to be his most important political benefactor. Hoping for this is just like all the pretending that "sensible centrists" do about the Bush administration: "If only he did something that's totally out of character, totally against past precedent, and totally against his political interests, everything would be fine!" The inability to work with (or even accept the existence of) people the administration doesn't like is seriously damaging our foreign policy, and this myopic strategy appears likely to continue:
A former senior official said the big test would be whether Mr. Maliki could confront Mr. Sadr. "If you don’t do that, I don’t know how he can succeed," the official said.When did containment become such a dirty word? There's a reason "realism" and "reality" look alike. I don't like Sadr, and he's responsible for a significant amount of carnage in Iraq, both against Coalition forces and Iraqis, but we cannot afford to open up a front against the Shia in Iraq. The administration is fond of making World War II analogies, so maybe they'll understand this: forcing Maliki to go after Sadr, or doing it ourselves, would be about as good an idea as Germany opening up the Eastern Front against Russia. If we can't pacify Iraq with 140,000 troops, tank divisions, helicopter gunships, and fighter jets, Maliki certainly can't do it by having a chat with Moqtada al-Sadr. A political resolution is going to take time, which is an absolute tragedy as people continue to die by the thousands, but publicly intimating that Maliki is weak isn't going to help anything, and it further demonstrates the administration's inability to comprehend basic and vital ground truths.
