The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat by Vali Nasr

Author:Vali Nasr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Political Freedom, International Relations, General, Middle East, Political Science, History
ISBN: 9780385536486
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2013-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

On the campaign trail, Obama had said that Iraq was a misguided enterprise, a needless and costly war of choice that had tarnished America’s image. So it was not a surprise that the White House celebrated when the last convoy of American soldiers left Iraq for Kuwait on December 18, 2011. It was the fulfillment of a campaign promise, or, as Vice President Biden called it, “one of the great achievements of this administration.” (He went on to promise “a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”)1 Less was more, in the administration’s thinking. The withdrawal would make achieving our goals there more likely.

When Bush left office, Iraq did look as if it was on the rebound. General David Petraeus’s COIN strategy and the surge of troops in 2007 had turned the fiasco of the war into something of a success story. When Obama came in, Iraq was enjoying relative calm. The insurgency had ended, al-Qaeda in Iraq was a thing of the past, and the fragile peace between Shias and Sunnis was holding.

But storm clouds loomed. Iraq’s government was hopelessly corrupt and ineffective. We were in part responsible for that failure by first hastily dismantling the Iraqi state and then giving Iraq a constitution that confirmed sectarian divisions while requiring an overwhelming majority before a government could form—which could be achieved by promising control of large areas of government to prospective allies to milk as they saw fit. Even then, it took Iraqi politicians six months of squabbling after the March 2010 elections to form a government. At best, in 2009 when the Obama administration took office, Iraq was going sideways, unity and peace beyond its reach.

The problem, many think, is Maliki. Since taking office in 2006 he has proven, at various times and in various ways, both ineffectual and dictatorial. He hails from the smallest of the three major Shia political parties, al-Da’awa, and has had to rely on the support of a constellation of Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish political blocs to govern.

His on-and-off relations with the firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr worry many, but by and large U.S. authorities have found ways to work with him. Once or twice he has even managed to pleasantly surprise America with bold action. No one found fault with Maliki’s leadership when he saddled up in the spring of 2008 to lead the nascent Iraqi army into Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood and then the southern city of Basra in order to flush out and defeat the so-called Mahdi Army, Sadr’s private force of Shia militiamen.

But all told, Maliki has not amounted to the kind of leader that Iraq needs.2 He is a weak manager,3 and his authoritarian style has even alienated his own Shia (and Kurdish) allies.4 Maliki is deeply sectarian, still nursing anger born from the years of abuse that Shias suffered at the hands of the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein. When Maliki first emerged on the scene, he openly embraced Shia chauvinism and talked of revenge against Sunnis—payback for decades of mistreatment.

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