Maliki and Iran

Official Iranian news sources report on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's visit to Teheran:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki said Baghdad in its ties with other countries only acts based on the interests and demands of the Iraqi nation. The office of the Iraqi Prime Minister on Saturday in response to a warning by the US President George W. Bush against Baghdad’s development of ties with Tehran announced in a statement: The groundless warning was issued with the aim of overshadowing the successful achievements of Mr Al-Maliki in his recent visit to Tehran.The Iraqi Prime Minister’s office further announced: If the US President assumes that the level of Iraq’s ties with other countries would be determined according to his views, then he is wrong.George W. Bush on Thursday on the second day of Maliki's visit to Iran repeated his baseless claims that Iran interferes in the internal affairs of Iraq. This is while Nuri Al-Maliki on the same day appreciated Iran for helping Iraq establish security and stability, calling for expansion of ties with Iran.

It seems obvious to me that the takeaway here is that we should stop expending vast amounts of resources mucking around in Iraq, but I suppose one could take the Ken Pollack view that this means we need to sink deeper into the muck by deposing (but by no means ousting) Maliki's government and trying to find a more helpful client.

Comments

Matt, that isn't even the best buried story about Maliki of the day. The best buried story is the AP story about the Italian investigation into weapons smuggling into Iraq. Apparently, the DAWA party is using the tradition of buying black market weapons to arm militias in an all attempt to, uh, promote democracy!

Here's a couple of heartwarming grafs from the story:

"[The italian police] discovery [of a smuggler at an airport] led anti-Mafia investigators down a monthslong trail of telephone and e-mail intercepts, into the midst of a huge black-market transaction, as Iraqi and Italian partners haggled over shipping more than 100,000 Russian-made automatic weapons into the bloodbath of Iraq.

As the secretive, $40 million deal neared completion, Italian authorities moved in, making arrests and breaking it up. But key questions remain unanswered.

For one thing, The Associated Press has learned that Iraqi government officials were involved in the deal, apparently without the knowledge of the U.S. Baghdad command _ a departure from the usual pattern of U.S.-overseen arms purchases.

Why these officials resorted to "black" channels and where the weapons were headed is unclear."

As cool is the echo, which we will never hear in any front page story, of the favorite American narrative about the Iranians arming the militias:

"Some guns the U.S. bought for Iraq's police and army are unaccounted for, possibly fallen into the hands of insurgents or sectarian militias. Meanwhile, the planned replacement of the army's AK-47s with U.S.-made M-16s may throw more assault rifles onto the black market. And the weapons free-for-all apparently is spilling over borders: Turkey and Iran complain U.S.-supplied guns are flowing from Iraq to anti-government militants on their soil.

Iraqi middlemen in the Italian deal, in intercepted e-mails, claimed the arrangement had official American approval. A U.S. spokesman in Baghdad denied that."

A normal person couldn't really devise a foreign policy as stupid, vile and witless as the Bush foreign policy. It takes that special panache, that Rovian talent - the kind of thinking that appeals to dittoheads, the foxfed, the dress up in uniform fetishists. As the credit dries up and the cost of this war comes home in all kinds of different ways, there will be a certain Schadenfreude in seeing the Redstate zombies complain about it. You got what you paid for, suckers.

Posted by roger | August 12, 2007 4:40 PM

Evan Thomas of Newsweek asserted on Inside Washington that Maliki's visit to Tehran was anticipating a US withdrawal based on all this talk in Washington, i.e. Democrats undermining the war effort. Rather than note that this isn't the first post-Saddam government to visit Tehran, he seemed to want to portray it as the unfortunate consequence of insufficient recognition that Kristol-Pollack momentum for another F.U. was building quite nicely. I could almost hear a scolding sigh and a 'shame on you' for forcing Maliki's hand.

Posted by racrecir | August 12, 2007 6:01 PM

Maliki is one of the most irrelevant people on the planet right now.

First of all, he's just a front for the Shia parties - and an expendable one at that, from both their perspective and the perspective of the neocons.

Second, whatever Bush and the Israelis have planned for the Middle East, he isn't going to have any say in it.

Third, Iraq isn't even relevant to what is being planned - except of course that the loss (not the defeat, the LOSS) of much of our forces in Iraq is likely when the war on Iran starts. But that's not something Bush and the neocons or the Israelis care about, as long as they get their war.

Within the next year or two, the sort of casualties the US is taking in Iraq now will be considered "the good old days."

By that time, Maliki will be dead (either from a Sunni - or US - bullet or an Iranian missile on the Green Zone) or in exile.

As William Lind suggests in his recent article in "The American Conservative", the only person in Iraq with a hope of getting any kind of government functioning is Moqtada al-Sadr - and then only if the US decides to reconcile with him and with Iran. Only if the US pulls out and basically allows al-Sadr to make deals with the Sunnis and Iran is there any possibility (not likelihood, note, but mere possibility) of Iraq pulling out from a genocidal civil war.

But that isn't going to happen. The war in Iran will be started within the next year most likely, and the Shia and al-Sadr both will guarantee the defeat of the US in Iraq. Maliki will be deposed and someone else put in his place eventually.

I suppose it's just possible that he could survive an Iranian attack on the Green Zone and then win the hearts and minds of Iraqis by totally turning on the US and directing all Iraqi forces against us in league with the Iranians, but let's face it - the US would shoot him first.

The guy has absolutely no future.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 13, 2007 3:05 AM

William Lind is an idiot. Sadr would be no more competent or effective a leader than Maliki. He has already demonstrated his incompetence and corrosive level of corruption by running the health industry into the ground.

The best hope the Shiites have for a competent leader is ironically Ahmed Chalabi, who is currently a political appointee of the Iraqi government, but not an MP. He will be after the next elections though, and he will probably end up being PM.

Posted by Juan | August 13, 2007 8:08 AM

Juan, interesting prediction. In the last Iraqi election, Chalabi's party garnered a whopping 0 seats in Parliament. The Sadrists, on the other hand, hold a quarter of the seats in the ruling coalition and I've read no news account that they are losing popularity - on the contrary, they seem to have SCIRI on the run in the South. So, Chalabi seems to have the same chance to become PM as Kucinich has to become president. A pretty outside chance.

Even if the Sadrist gain a clear majority, however, in some upcoming election, Sadr won't be in the government, because that isn't his role, any more than it is Sistani's.

Posted by roger | August 13, 2007 11:53 AM

Lind's point wasn't that al-Sadr would be a PM or something, but that he could put together deals with the Sunnis and the Shia that could conceivably - no guarantees! Note! - conceivably put a government in place that wouldn't be automatically a loser.

Lind said nothing more than that - it was the ONLY possibility he could see for the US getting some sort of "win" out of the situation - and then ONLY if the US 1) got out and 2) made a rapprochement with both al-Sadr and Iran.

Of course, Lind was merely speculating - obviously NONE of that is going to happen.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 13, 2007 5:23 PM