Tom Hayden in a special to the Huffington Post::
"A peaceful coup is being attempted in Baghdad, seeking to replace Nouri al-Maliki with a coalition between the Sunni political leader Saleh al-Mutlak and the Shiite insurgent leader Moqtada al-Sadr.
In the background are calls from Iraq's leading Shiite and Sunni clerics for an American withdrawal timetable.
Al-Mutlak, an ex-Baathist who heads the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue has eleven seats in parliament which, combined with Sadr's twenty percent bloc, is enough to destabilize or even bring down the regime of al-Maliki.
As reported last week in the Huntington Post, secret efforts to strike a deal with the Sunni nationalist resistance have been underway for months. Ex-Baathists like Mutlak, Sunnis in the Muslim Scholars Association, and in particular the revered Sunni cleric Harith al-Dhari, are strongly supportive of a political settlement based on a US withdrawal timetable. But the sudden move by al-Sadr's Shiite bloc, which pulled out of the Baghdad government over al-Maliki's meeting with Bush, provides the anti-occupation coalition with significant, perhaps decisive, power, if they choose to bring down al-Maliki's shaky coalition.
US commanders make no secret of their desire to crush al-Sadr's Mahdi Army - indeed they are waging a war of attrition - but they will be frustrated if the new coalition takes hold. Mainstream media has reported that the US has hoped to cajole the Sunnis to align with al-Maliki against al-Sadr, a scenario that seemingly is being rejected and reversed. Instead, al-Sadr's bloc is demanding a US timeline for withdrawal.
CNN' Nick Robertson featured an interview today [Thursday morning] with al-Mutlak in Baghdad, describing the unfolding transition plan as having been months in the making. It appeared that a threatened al-Maliki would have to join the call for US withdrawal, or face the possibility of being replaced by an interim government. Wolf Blitzer described the al-Maliki government as "teetering." [Earlier this year, 104 Iraqi parliamentarians, over forty percent of its membership, signed a resolution calling for an American withdrawal timetable; it was tabled under American pressure.]
Any of these scenarios would seem intolerable to the Bush Administration. But how would it respond to a demand from a reconstituted Baghdad government for a withdrawal timetable? Send more American troops into Sadr City? Facing a request from Baghdad for withdrawal, American domestic demand for a pullout could become overwhelming, even for Bush.
This week's immediate outcome cannot be predicted, depending as it does on al-Maliki's response, the US embassy's role, and above all, the determination of al-Sadr to forge a coalition with al-Mutlak across the sectarian divides.
However, al-Sadr is a well-known Arab Shiite often at odds with more pro-Irani Shiite parties like that Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, and has been a critic of the "political quietism" of the elderly Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. His base is the Shiite urban underclass, centered in Sadr City slum. His forces fought in collaboration with the Sunnis during the American siege of Falluja in 2004, and rose against the American forces on two other occasions in 2003 and 2004. They have sent 100,000 people into the streets demanding US withdrawal, and on one occasion collected one million signatures door to door on a withdrawal petition. [for more information, see Ahmed Hashim's Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, Cornell, 2006]
IF INTERESTED, READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT HUFFINGTONPOST DOT COM. IT IS LONG.
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I wonder how the fluid, violent situation in Iraq will effect Bush's foreign policy in the next few months?
Will soldiers want to go there under the increase of force proposed by Bush and McCain? |
