Is Bush About To Overthrow The Iraqi Government?

First the good news - the Iraqi government may finally have found a successful strategy for kicking Al-Qaida out of the Sunni heartlands.

Qaida in Iraq is being pushed out of its strongholds in Anbar province after three days of fighting with Iraq's fiercely independent tribes. A number of al-Qaida fighters have been killed and captured, including Saudis and Syrians.
The clashes erupted after a new grouping calling itself the Anbar Rescue Council - which claims to represent a large number of Anbar tribes and sub-clans - said it intended to clear the province of the terrorist group. It also follows a meeting between tribal leaders and the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, last week in which they asked for government support and arms in their fight against al-Qaida.

...Where once tribal leaders in Anbar and western Iraq welcomed al-Qaida, providing them with safehouses and other logistical support, there is now open war.

From Falluja, where the notoriously fractious Bou Eisa clan have turned against al-Qaida, to the city of Qaim, where it is the Bou Mahal who are pursuing them, they are being being pushed out of their old strongholds in the rural west.

The tribes' courtship by Iraq's prime minister has been oiled by cash gifts and alleged salaries to some sheikhs of up to $5,000 (£2,650) a month. Tribal fighters have also asked for weapons.

It is a battle being driven by deep-rooted social, religious and political considerations. The traditional power of the tribal leaders has been undermined by al-Qaida "emirs". Some sheikhs have also become sickened by al-Qaida attacks aimed at Shias, believing they are not only wrong, but that they will ultimately hurt Sunnis - an issue that apparently came to a head with the bombing of the Golden Shrine in Samarra in February.

..."[The tribal leaders] are pragmatic and follow their own interests," said one western official. "When al-Qaida arrived they had lots of money. Now they don't, and it is the government that is throwing lots of money at cities such as Ramadi. Also the al-Qaida types tend to come in with the ideology of killing everyone, which does not fit in with the way that tribal types think about fighting. In short, they are pissed off."

Its unclear that this will have a major effect on Iraqi unrest, though. The insurgency is a many-headed hydra and Sunni tribal leaders are still vehemently opposed, in the main, to the U.S. occupation. Attacks on American troops have not fallen even though Al Qaida is being badly beaten by the tribes - which can only be because other elements of the insurgency are taking up any slack. In any case, indigenous groups always played a bigger role than the White House and Pentagon wanted to admit. This new effort is also unlikely to temper sectarian fighting either. Sunni leaders are still angry at Iraqi government inaction on pulling the teeth of Shia militias which are intimately intertwined with ministries and the police. Money and weapons given to fight Al Qaeda will suffice to fight Shia militias too.

And that inability to temper sectarian feuding or Iraq's civil war is the driving force behind the bad news, according to the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl. He says that the Bush administration are seriously considering backtracking on everything they have ever said about Iraqi sovereignty, Iraqi democracy and "we will stand up as they stand down" by overthrowing Maliki's government.

The central question for discussion is this: Should the United States continue to depend on Iraq's "unity" government and army to carry out the political, military and economic measures needed to stabilize the country -- most important, a political settlement among its warring sectarian factions? Or is it necessary to override the new political system and mount some sort of intervention, led by the United States and perhaps other governments, to force the necessary deals?

...President Bush has been hinting about this decision point ever since Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's visit to Washington in July. "Iraq can count on our partnership as long as the new government continues to make the hard decisions necessary to advance a unified, democratic and peaceful Iraq," Bush said in an Aug. 31 speech. Administration officials say the passage was a warning deliberately aimed at Maliki.

Diehl writes that if the Iraqi government has not made serious headway on sectarian strife by the end of the year then the White House could be "tipped toward the conclusion that the United States can't look to the new political system for solutions". He then, naively, goes on to hope that intervention would take the shape of a new international coalition of peacekeepers which would include Iraq's neighbours and some form of strong federalist partition of Iraq.

For myself, I think that the Bush administration would be far liklier to return to its original plan, derailled by the Iraqis themselves, of installing a new Bush-friendly strongman dictator rather than pursuing a democratic experiment that would be far less controllable. Many neocon voices with influence in the administration's foreign policy have continued to call for such a move in any case. The ideal place to find such a strongman would be among the Kurds - the staunchest of Bush supporters among the Iraqis - for they have the strongest motivations to both suppress Shia and Sunni political voices and to cleave to the U.S. as a hedge against Turkey and Iran.