Sectarian Politics
Michael Burleigh writing in The Times lifted the lid on the workings of what passes for 'good government' in Iraq until very recently, while his piece resisted the obvious temptation to make easy or partisan political points.
Power sharing is not part of the political culture in many parts of the Islamic world, where religious certainties and tribal loyalties matter much more than notions of tolerance, fairness or 'live and let live'.
Since the article was published Nouri al-Maliki has been manoeuvred out of office even though he 'won' the election fair and square, but the task in Iraq is to build the kind of broad-based government that voters in many western countries take for granted.
The Nixon of the Middle East must go now
By Michael Burleigh - The Times
Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s embattled prime minister, must be replaced before the US and allies join the fight against Isis
The fate of Iraq hangs on the isolated, gloomy figure of Nouri al-Maliki. To western eyes, the embattled prime minister is as monochrome as an accountant, but to many Iraqis — and not just Sunnis and Kurds — he is all too colourful, though not as vividly tyrannical as Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic offspring. Even Raghad, the dictator’s eldest daughter, is urging on the Sunni Islamist armies of Isis so she can worship at Saddam’s tomb.
Thanks to Maliki’s carefully maintainedgrip on Iraq’s security forces, he imagines he is vital to the country’s ability to repel the insurgency. But even members of his own majority Shia faction, and not merely the minority Sunnis, know that Maliki is the problem rather than the solution.
That is why Iran and the US are demanding political reform — up to and including Maliki’s replacement — as a precondition for armed intervention, thereby taking the opposite approach to the rush to war in 2003 that created this chaos in the first place.
Maliki has come a long way from the date farm in southern Iraq where he was born 64 years ago. He revered his grandfather, a poet and Shia cleric who took part in a revolt against British occupation in 1920. Although his father Kamel became an ardent Arab nationalist, the ascendancy of the secular Baath party in Iraq drove Maliki towards the political Islamism of his grandfather. He joined the clandestine Dawa (or “Call”) movement at a mosque in Hindiya.
Political choices often determine life’s chances. Maliki’s refusal to join the Baath party thwarted his desire to be a teacher; instead he became an accountant in a local education department, which functioned as a secret Dawa cell. After one nerve-racking encounter with Saddam’s secret policemen, Maliki fled to Syria in 1979, after which the Baathists murdered at least 67 of the relatives he left behind. He is a stranger to his wider surviving kinsfolk.
His sojourn in Damascus ended abruptly in 1982, after Dawa bombers killed the Iraqi ambassador to Lebanon and 60 others, though Maliki denies any direct involvement in this operation, just as he denies any involvement in an Iranian-sponsored bombing of the US and French embassies in Kuwait a few years later. After fleeing Syria, Maliki underwent training at a Dawa military camp in revolutionary Iran. Common cause with the Revolutionary Guards did not quite compensate for being patronised by his haughty Persian hosts, who created a more biddable version of Dawa, leaving men like Maliki in the cold. “You don’t know their arrogance until you live among them,” Maliki said years later. In 1991 he returned to Damascus to work in the anti-Saddam Shia underground, except that Syria and Iraq were undergoing a rapprochement. He had a low opinion of his hosts. “Boy, I know the Syrians, and believe me, they are sons of bitches to the last man. They need to remember that we know how to blow things up in other people’s cities,” he told a western diplomat, perhaps alluding to events in Beirut or Kuwait.
Shortly after Saddam was toppled by the American-led coalition in 2003, this vengeful man returned in a taxi to Iraq, where he became a mid-level functionary and member of parliament specialising in purging former Baathists. When in 2006 mild-mannered Ibrahim al-Jaafari proved unable to stop sectarian bloodshed, the CIA recommended the “unknown” Maliki replace him as prime minister. The CIA declared that Maliki was “tough” and not in Tehran’s pocket, despite all evidence to the contrary. With their usual sophistication, the CIA pronounced: “All we knew was that he was not a super-duper bad guy like some of the others.” Whether this graduate of Shia underground movements with a penchant for purging Baathists was fit to lead a nation seems not to have bothered the Americans.
For Maliki, trust is a matter of life and death, so he filled the entire Iraqi security apparatus with relatives and Dawa cronies. Everyone from his son Ahmed to a former driver who had become a butcher in Australia was rewarded with powerful roles.
Maliki’s reputation as a strong leader grew as US and Sunni forces crushed al-Qaeda in Iraq’s Anbar province, before again, with US help, he defeated the Mahdi army in Basra after the British discovered the limits of softly-softly soldiering.
Becoming Iraq’s prime minister in 2010 through jiggery-pokery coalition building, Maliki’s authoritarian tendencies were held in check by the American presence, as they brokered deals between rival political factions. The shadowy influence of the Iranian Quds force supremo, Qassem Suleimani, ensured that Maliki rejected US terms for retaining a residual force in Iraq. Now he’s begging for airstrikes.
Once the US pulled out, Maliki’s Nixonian paranoia was unleashed. He purged Sunnis from all senior positions from the Central Bank to the National Intelligence Service. The highest-ranking Sunni, the vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi, had to flee for his life after trumped-up charges of organising death squads were brought against him.
Instead of taking on one enemy at a time, Maliki next alienated the only part of Iraq that works — the Kurds in the north — by failing to pay them the percentage of oil revenues that was their due. Unsurprisingly, the Kurds have opted to pipe or truck oil to neighbouring Turkey in defiance of Baghdad’s writ. The autonomous region of Kurdistan is now simply waiting for the decree nisi of a divorce.
Maliki’s explanation for his woes is characteristically conspiratorial: Isis is the evil progeny of ill-wishers in Saudi Arabia, for along the way he has managed to make enemies from Ankara to Riyadh.
His domestic opponents suspect that Maliki initially saw the insurgency as a chance to amass even more personal power. When he asked parliament for emergency powers, not enough MPs turned up to make a quorum, suggesting that many smelt a rat. He has also sought to exploit the insurgents as living proof that Sunni Islam is synonymous with terrorism.
Maliki is hoping to crush the jihadists at the gates of Baghdad by recruiting Shia militias, which is as sensible as trying to douse a fire with a can of petrol.
Not a single US F16 should appear before this failed figure is replaced by a national unity government, capable of devising a more inclusive, federalised Iraq. Only then may the Sunni tribes risk joining in a fight against Isis that they know from bitter experience in Anbar can easily turn on them.
Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s embattled prime minister, must be replaced before the US and allies join the fight against Isis
The fate of Iraq hangs on the isolated, gloomy figure of Nouri al-Maliki. To western eyes, the embattled prime minister is as monochrome as an accountant, but to many Iraqis — and not just Sunnis and Kurds — he is all too colourful, though not as vividly tyrannical as Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic offspring. Even Raghad, the dictator’s eldest daughter, is urging on the Sunni Islamist armies of Isis so she can worship at Saddam’s tomb.
Thanks to Maliki’s carefully maintainedgrip on Iraq’s security forces, he imagines he is vital to the country’s ability to repel the insurgency. But even members of his own majority Shia faction, and not merely the minority Sunnis, know that Maliki is the problem rather than the solution.
That is why Iran and the US are demanding political reform — up to and including Maliki’s replacement — as a precondition for armed intervention, thereby taking the opposite approach to the rush to war in 2003 that created this chaos in the first place.
Maliki has come a long way from the date farm in southern Iraq where he was born 64 years ago. He revered his grandfather, a poet and Shia cleric who took part in a revolt against British occupation in 1920. Although his father Kamel became an ardent Arab nationalist, the ascendancy of the secular Baath party in Iraq drove Maliki towards the political Islamism of his grandfather. He joined the clandestine Dawa (or “Call”) movement at a mosque in Hindiya.
Political choices often determine life’s chances. Maliki’s refusal to join the Baath party thwarted his desire to be a teacher; instead he became an accountant in a local education department, which functioned as a secret Dawa cell. After one nerve-racking encounter with Saddam’s secret policemen, Maliki fled to Syria in 1979, after which the Baathists murdered at least 67 of the relatives he left behind. He is a stranger to his wider surviving kinsfolk.
His sojourn in Damascus ended abruptly in 1982, after Dawa bombers killed the Iraqi ambassador to Lebanon and 60 others, though Maliki denies any direct involvement in this operation, just as he denies any involvement in an Iranian-sponsored bombing of the US and French embassies in Kuwait a few years later. After fleeing Syria, Maliki underwent training at a Dawa military camp in revolutionary Iran. Common cause with the Revolutionary Guards did not quite compensate for being patronised by his haughty Persian hosts, who created a more biddable version of Dawa, leaving men like Maliki in the cold. “You don’t know their arrogance until you live among them,” Maliki said years later. In 1991 he returned to Damascus to work in the anti-Saddam Shia underground, except that Syria and Iraq were undergoing a rapprochement. He had a low opinion of his hosts. “Boy, I know the Syrians, and believe me, they are sons of bitches to the last man. They need to remember that we know how to blow things up in other people’s cities,” he told a western diplomat, perhaps alluding to events in Beirut or Kuwait.
Shortly after Saddam was toppled by the American-led coalition in 2003, this vengeful man returned in a taxi to Iraq, where he became a mid-level functionary and member of parliament specialising in purging former Baathists. When in 2006 mild-mannered Ibrahim al-Jaafari proved unable to stop sectarian bloodshed, the CIA recommended the “unknown” Maliki replace him as prime minister. The CIA declared that Maliki was “tough” and not in Tehran’s pocket, despite all evidence to the contrary. With their usual sophistication, the CIA pronounced: “All we knew was that he was not a super-duper bad guy like some of the others.” Whether this graduate of Shia underground movements with a penchant for purging Baathists was fit to lead a nation seems not to have bothered the Americans.
For Maliki, trust is a matter of life and death, so he filled the entire Iraqi security apparatus with relatives and Dawa cronies. Everyone from his son Ahmed to a former driver who had become a butcher in Australia was rewarded with powerful roles.
Maliki’s reputation as a strong leader grew as US and Sunni forces crushed al-Qaeda in Iraq’s Anbar province, before again, with US help, he defeated the Mahdi army in Basra after the British discovered the limits of softly-softly soldiering.
Becoming Iraq’s prime minister in 2010 through jiggery-pokery coalition building, Maliki’s authoritarian tendencies were held in check by the American presence, as they brokered deals between rival political factions. The shadowy influence of the Iranian Quds force supremo, Qassem Suleimani, ensured that Maliki rejected US terms for retaining a residual force in Iraq. Now he’s begging for airstrikes.
Once the US pulled out, Maliki’s Nixonian paranoia was unleashed. He purged Sunnis from all senior positions from the Central Bank to the National Intelligence Service. The highest-ranking Sunni, the vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi, had to flee for his life after trumped-up charges of organising death squads were brought against him.
Instead of taking on one enemy at a time, Maliki next alienated the only part of Iraq that works — the Kurds in the north — by failing to pay them the percentage of oil revenues that was their due. Unsurprisingly, the Kurds have opted to pipe or truck oil to neighbouring Turkey in defiance of Baghdad’s writ. The autonomous region of Kurdistan is now simply waiting for the decree nisi of a divorce.
Maliki’s explanation for his woes is characteristically conspiratorial: Isis is the evil progeny of ill-wishers in Saudi Arabia, for along the way he has managed to make enemies from Ankara to Riyadh.
His domestic opponents suspect that Maliki initially saw the insurgency as a chance to amass even more personal power. When he asked parliament for emergency powers, not enough MPs turned up to make a quorum, suggesting that many smelt a rat. He has also sought to exploit the insurgents as living proof that Sunni Islam is synonymous with terrorism.
Maliki is hoping to crush the jihadists at the gates of Baghdad by recruiting Shia militias, which is as sensible as trying to douse a fire with a can of petrol.
Not a single US F16 should appear before this failed figure is replaced by a national unity government, capable of devising a more inclusive, federalised Iraq. Only then may the Sunni tribes risk joining in a fight against Isis that they know from bitter experience in Anbar can easily turn on them.
