Martin Jay :
The shaky news footage of piles of uniforms spoke a thousand words. The Iraqi military fled the battlefield, leaving behind tanks, Humvees and other vehicles. In cities such as Fallujah, Al Qaeda’s understudy is now taking control at an alarming rate. We are now looking at the flames of sectarianism, rather than merely feeling the heat of its frying pan oil as this group of extremists plough ahead with their ambitions of creating an Islamic State in the Levant.
Many in Washington now are turning on Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki who never hid his sectarian colours. Enraged by his recent appeals for air strikes, they believe he can’t be trusted as an ally any more. And he certainly cannot put a fractured Iraq back together again, no matter how many weapons the Obama administration sends him.
Iraq always needed a tough guy to keep the lid on its sectarian broth. And this was George W Bush’s gamble as, advised by the neo conservative cronies of his father’s day – Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz – he blundered on while these old boys fulfilled their ultimate boyhood fantasy: to destroy Saddam Hussein. But then when the party ended, Bush blinked. And in those few seconds of hesitation committed the biggest blunder possibly in the history of US foreign policy by firing some half a million men of Saddam’s army.
A revolution started almost immediately and the quick-fix solution seemed to be Maliki who played the right tunes for Bush in Washington. Yet a revolution is now amidst again.
Maliki’s failure is not attributed to the lake of sectarian blood which he sluiced, but something even more sensitive to Arabs and the basis of the Arab Spring revolts in 2011: corruption.
Graft comes in many forms. But the one that angers Arabs the most is favouratism. Equality is the new buzzword stretching from Morocco to the Gulf and Maliki’s sectarian political style has helped create the ISIS backlash through his patent bias towards his own sect. He has gutted the army of the commanders he suspected of plotting against him with some US expert likening him to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who invented ‘ethnic cleansing’ long before a US spook coined the phrase in the 90s when writing on the Yugoslav war.
But the murders, carried out by his own ministries’ henchmen, have also sparked the payback. Struan Stevenson MEP squarely accuses Maliki of being directly responsible for what he says is state-organised killing. “Maliki has, contrary to the Erbil Agreement signed shortly after the last Iraqi elections, retained control of all of the key ministries of Defence, Internal Security, Intelligence, Police”, Stevenson argues. “He cannot, therefore, deny responsibility for atrocities carried out, almost on a daily basis, by his military and intelligence… with 8,000 dead so far this year, Maliki’s answer is a system of secret prisons, mass executions, torture and repression”.
“For the past eight years the US has provided unilateral support for Maliki and has maintained silence about his atrocities against Iraqi citizens,” he said recently in Brussels. “The US has also turned a blind eye to the increasing domination of the Iranian regime in Iraq, which has played a major role in creating the current situation”.
So can Maliki now ask more of Iran after the service that he carries out to Tehran? Maliki’s role in the recent massacre of Iranian dissidents at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, many argue, demonstrates a deeper loyalty. During the early morning hours of September 1, Iraqi forces massacred 52 unarmed Iranian dissidents and took a further seven hostage.
Either way, Maliki, who was the preferred choice of the US State Department, has outstayed his welcome. We should have all known something was very deeply wrong when George W. Bush held a two day meeting in Camp David with all his top brass and on the second day surprised them all with a stunt: overnight he flew to Baghdad and joined them live via a webcast with Maliki standing by his side.
Bush’s endearment of Maliki was akin to his whole strategy on Iraq: fickle, like the non-acoustic new radar system that the Soviets were developing for their submarines in the 80s, which spooked Donald Rumsfeld out so much, that he assumed the new radar must be ‘non-acoustic’ as the Americans couldn’t detect it. In fact, there was no such radar. The subs were not even there.
(Martin Jay is the Beirut correspondent for the Khaleej Times )
