WASHINGTON – Ten and a half years after invading U.S. troops ousted President Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, Iraq re-emerged here this week, if only briefly, as a major foreign policy agenda item.
The occasion was the visit of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki whose main purpose was to secure greater U.S. military and security assistance just two years after the last U.S. troops and advisers left Iraq due to his government’s refusal to grant them immunity from Iraqi law.
Official Washington appears genuinely concerned about the resurrection of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
With sectarian violence now claiming over 1,000 lives a month – and approaching the levels that prevailed in 2007-08 when the country tottered on the edge of all-out civil war – Maliki called in particular for the delivery of powerful weapons systems, notably helicopter gunships, to fight an increasingly lethal Al-Qaeda-linked insurgency that has been re-energised in important part by the raging civil war in Syria next door.
Members of his delegation hinted that Baghdad might also welcome the return of some U.S. military personnel as advisers, as well as drones to patrol Iraqi skies, although they were careful not to press the issue publicly, apparently for fear of a political backlash back home six months before the next scheduled elections in which Maliki is expected to run for a third term.
“We were partners and we shed blood together while fighting terrorists,” he told his audience Thursday at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) in reference to nine-year-old U.S.-led effort to curb mainly Sunni resistance to Washington’s occupation and Shia-led governments.
“We will defeat the terrorists by our local efforts and our partnership with the United States,” he added, calling for “a global war against terror.”
While the administration of President Barack Obama, with whom Maliki held a low-key White House meeting Friday, dropped such rhetoric long ago, senior officials said they were receptive to his requests.
“The Iraqis have asked for weapons systems from us. …[W]e support those requests, and we’re working with the Congress through those as appropriate,” said a senior official after a key meeting between Maliki and Vice President Joe Biden, who has effectively headed the administration’s Iraq portfolio since 2009 when Washington began its withdrawal from the country.
But the officials stressed that the Iraqi president’s own sectarian leanings and authoritarian leadership style also bore major responsibility for the growing threat posed by radical Sunni Islamists, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which has steadily consolidated its position in eastern Syria along the Iraqi border.
Indeed, the major message conveyed to the Iraqi leader here by the both the administration and Congress, key members of which Maliki also met this week, is that military power and counter-terrorist measures, even with enhanced U.S. cooperation, will not by themselves be sufficient to defeat the challenges facing Baghdad.
“…[I]f Prime Minister Maliki continues to marginalize the Kurds, alienate many Shia, and treat large numbers of Sunnis as terrorists, no amount of security assistance will be able to bring stability and security to Iraq,” argued a letter to Obama signed by a bipartisan group of six of the Senate’s most influential members as Maliki arrived here.
It accused Maliki of “too often pursuing a sectarian and authoritarian agenda. …It is essential that you urge Prime Minister Maliki to adopt a strategy to address Iraq’s serious problems of governance,” they wrote.
And while lawmakers, even after meeting with Maliki Thursday, continued to suggest that they would condition increased military assistance and sales on Maliki’s pursuit of a more conciliatory policy toward Sunnis and Kurds, official Washington appears genuinely concerned about the resurrection of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the downward spiral of violence in Iraq and its broader implications.
Indeed, “Countering Al-Qaida Affiliated Groups” comprised the central section of a three-page “Joint Statement” approved by Obama and Maliki at their White House meeting Friday.
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