Maliki Getting the Idea?
Ed Morrissey has a highly interesting post up about Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. It seems that al-Maliki has decided that – if he wants to save Iraq and wants to prevent his government from collapsing – he has to work with Sunni tribal leaders. He even went to Tikrit: bastion of the Baath Party, and the place where Saddam Hussein was born. The most important leaders of Saddam’s regime, all came from this city.
Maliki tried to convince the tribal leaders that they should work with him against Al Qaeda… and against the Shiite militias. It seems that Iraq’s Shiite PM has finally decided to completely break with terrorist leader Muqtada al-Sadr. It will be interesting to see whether it pays off or whether Maliki will overplay his hand (which is not very strong of course).
2 Responses to “Maliki Getting the Idea?”
Let’s hope he is finally growing into his role; this is a good sign but too early to tell.
One concern, I’d think, is whether this will encourage his opponents to tar him with the “US lackey” brush, since he’s now echoing the parts of the surge strategy that he intially opposed. He’s got to be careful to frame this in a way that he’s seeing it in Iraqis’ interests to take these steps, not the US’s.
Juan Cole notes that the Tikrit visit is less than meets the eye.
http://www.juancole.com/2007/08/maliki-seeks-sunni-support-in-tikrit-4.html
Basically, Maliki is circumventing the elected Iraq Accordance Front (the moderate Sunni party with 44 members of Parliament that backed out of the government) in order to meet with a few self-described “representatives” among the tribal elite in Tikrit. The problem for these tribal Sunnis isn’t that they are too pro-US but they are not really representative of anybody but themselves.
In fact, this has been one of the biggest problems in the Iraqi political process all along. So much of the leadership lived in exile during the Saddam Hussein era, and they have lost touch with ordinary Iraqis. The Sunni insurgents and the Sadrists, on the other hand, lived and profited or suffered under the Saddam regime. For ordinary Iraqis, these other organizations easily get tarred as dupes of Iran or the US or some exile community and not as genuine representatives of the Iraqi people.