edthecynic
Censored for Cynicism
- Oct 20, 2008
- 43,044
- 6,883
Pathological liar Maliki hated the US all his life and supported Hezbollah, and Bush only made him hate America more! Maliki took the training wheels off, HIMSELF, while Bush was still "mentoring" him.
What We Left Behind - The New Yorker
A former senior C.I.A. officer, who served in Iraq during the war, told me that U.S. officials were given specific reports about the darkest aspects of Maliki’s past. But American diplomats who served in Iraq after the invasion said that they were unaware of any hard evidence that he had engaged in terrorism. “Getting a detailed sketch of Maliki was very difficult,” one told me. “All we knew was that he was not a super-duper bad guy, like some of the others.” When Maliki met with American officials, he denied being involved in terrorist attacks, and distanced himself from his patrons in Iran. “You can’t know what arrogance is until you are an Iraqi Arab forced to take refuge with the Iranians,” he told Ryan Crocker, at that time the American Ambassador to Iraq. He said that he had never learned Farsi, and used a translator whenever he met with Iranian officials. But his associate, who said that he was present at meetings with Iranians, told me, “Maliki can speak Farsi very easily.” And though Maliki insisted that Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored militia and political party, was an object of loathing in the Dawa Party, the associate told me that Maliki was very close to Hezbollah.
U.S. officials took many of the reports about Maliki and his associates to be rumor. At one point, Maliki and Crocker discussed a series of attacks in 1983, in which Dawa operatives in Kuwait bombed the embassies of the U.S. and France, evidently to retaliate for their support of Saddam. Maliki acknowledged that the bombers had belonged to Dawa, Crocker told me, but said that they were working exclusively for Iran. “Is that true?” Crocker said. “We decided that it was plausible enough.”
Jeffrey Beals, a former American diplomat, said that the U.S. knew Dawa had carried out attacks but didn’t think that Maliki’s potential involvement precluded his candidacy; most of the new Iraqi leaders had engaged in such activities. In the eighties, according to Crocker, the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, ran a “revolutionary consulate” in Damascus, where, under the auspices of Syrian intelligence, he issued false passports to militants active in the region. As Beals explained it, the Americans decided that waiting for an untainted partner was impractical: “A history of armed covert struggle against Saddam wasn’t a disqualifying factor.”
By the time Maliki returned to Baghdad, in April, 2003, he had come to regard the United States with profound animosity, friends and associates say. Over the years, the U.S. government had supported nearly all of his enemies—most notably Saddam—and opposed his friends, especially the revolutionary regime in Iran. “Maliki was known as an anti-American,” Dia al-Shakarchi, a Dawa activist in the eighties, said. “Even after 2003, his stance was very aggressive toward Americans.”
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By the time Maliki took office, the police and the Army were overwhelmingly Shiite, packed with former militiamen bent on cleansing Baghdad of Sunni Arabs. In the summer of 2006, each morning brought new reports of sectarian atrocities. Maliki did very little to stop them, according to Matthew Sherman, the civilian adviser to the U.S. Army. “We’d go into his office, we’d tell him about a massacre that had been carried out by his men,” Sherman told me. “And Maliki would just sit there and say, ‘I’m sure they were terrorists.’ We could never get him to act against the death squads.” (Maliki says that he never received any evidence that his soldiers or police had acted improperly.)
Maliki’s rivals in Baghdad began plotting to unseat him, and he occasionally made a display of strength. In 2006, after months of pushing the Americans to turn over Saddam, he took custody of the former President and hastily ordered an execution—carried out in an ill-lit basement, by men in masks, on the first day of Eid al Adha, the Muslim holiday.
As grainy cell-phone videos of the event sparked worldwide consternation, Maliki said that he’d rushed the execution because he was worried that Baathists would try to free Saddam—though he never produced any evidence. Criticism by human-rights groups left him unapologetic: “Where were they during the mass graves and the executions and the massacres that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?” American officials were appalled, believing that the hurried execution undercut the legitimacy of the Iraqi legal process. In videos, Saddam’s executioners chanted, “Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!,” a reference to Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iranian-backed guerrilla commander. Even the U.S. officials who had handed Saddam over said that the execution was a disaster for the country, both internally and abroad. “It was a lynching,” the former diplomat told me. “They basically martyred him.”
Whatever doubts remained about Maliki’s assertiveness evaporated on the night of March 22, 2008, when Maliki told General David Petraeus, the American military commander, that he had ordered the Iraqi Army into the southern city of Basra, where Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, was entrenched. Sadr was an old rival; his party competed with Dawa for the loyalty of Iraq’s vast Shiite underclass, drawing power from the Mahdi Army’s reputation for protecting against attacks by Sunni extremists. Maliki loathed Sadr, whom he regarded as coarse and uneducated, and was furious when the militia took over large parts of Baghdad and southern Iraq. Still, when Maliki announced the offensive in Basra, the Americans were stunned; they had warned that preparations for such an operation would take six months. Crocker told me that they had no choice: “We had to support him.”
The operation, called the Charge of the Knights, nearly ended in disaster. The Iraqi Army was underequipped and underprepared, and its ranks started to fall apart soon after the fighting began. Maliki flew into downtown Basra, landing at an old palace, which was surrounded by Sadr’s militiamen. The mortar fire was relentless; Maliki’s chief of security, whom he had known since childhood, was killed. In Washington, Brett McGurk, a national-security aide, walked into the Oval Office and put a map of Basra in front of President Bush. The map showed Sadr’s forces everywhere. “Maliki was this little red dot in the middle,” McGurk recalled. Bush, unfazed, said, “Make sure he wins.”
As the fighting raged, Crocker and Petraeus telephoned Maliki. “We could hear the mortar fire landing all around him,” Crocker said. “We suggested to the Prime Minister that he’d made his point, that perhaps it was time to declare victory and come home.” Maliki rebuffed them. “The Americans didn’t like the whole situation,” he told me. “I told them, ‘This is not your job. This is my job.’ I told them I would stay until we saw the battle to the end.”
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