bitter fued...could this be misdirection?

New York Times
Published June 25, 2011
Bitter Feud Between Top Iraqi Leaders Stalls Government
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and TIM ARANGO

BAGHDAD — Fifteen months after an election that was supposed to lay the groundwork for Iraq’s future, the government remains virtually paralyzed by a clash between the country’s two most powerful politicians, who refuse to speak to each other.

The paralysis is contributing to a rise in violence, and it is severely complicating negotiations on the most difficult and divisive question hanging over the country: Whether to ask the United States to keep a contingency force here after the scheduled withdrawal of American troops at the end of the year. The longer the deadlock persists, the harder it becomes for the American military to reverse or slow the withdrawal of the roughly 48,000 troops, the pace of which will pick up over the next few months.

In December, the two politicians, Ayad Allawi, the leader of the Iraqiya bloc, and the country’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, entered into an American-backed power-sharing agreement. But since then, the men have been unable to agree on who should run the Interior and Defense Ministries, the government’s two most important departments.

The United States has been unable to end the stalemate, demonstrating to some analysts and Iraqis its waning influence here.

Mr. Allawi, whose party received the most votes in last year’s election, has yet to show up in Parliament. Mr. Maliki has run the government on his own, and his aides have threatened to sue Mr. Allawi for calling them lying tyrants and claiming they are supported by Iran.

As the deadlock grinds on, political assassinations and attacks on American bases have increased significantly.

“This is the biggest dispute that has occurred here since 2003, and it will continue to escalate if a solution is not found, and that is our concern,” said Jabir al-Jabiri, a member of Parliament from Mr. Allawi’s Iraqiya bloc.

Without leaders in place at the Interior and Defense Ministries, decisions have been delayed about whether to single out terrorists, and the government has been unable to properly assess its military capabilities as it weighs whether to ask for the United States’ troops to remain, according to American officials.

“I think they have a very, very hard time having a meaningful rational debate and fully exploring all of their capabilities and limitations” without interior and defense ministers in place, said Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the United States military’s top spokesman in Iraq.

He added: “These are big decisions. So is your government going to be formed to make those decisions? Or is somebody going to make it in isolation? So I think that’s why I see the issues being connected.”

The power-sharing agreement in December allows Mr. Allawi’s party to appoint the defense minister, although Mr. Maliki has to approve the selection. It also said that Mr. Allawi would become the head of a largely undefined strategic council that was supposed to provide a counterweight to the prime minister.

But at the first session of Parliament, the agreement unraveled when Mr. Maliki appointed himself as the minister of both interior and defense, claiming that because of the country’s tenuous security environment he needed more time to vet the candidates.

Mr. Maliki has continued to refuse to fill those jobs, claiming that many of the names submitted by Mr. Allawi are not suitable. Mr. Maliki has also refused to give the strategic council any power because he says it is unconstitutional, and Mr. Allawi has declined to become the council’s leader.

“After the United States failed to put together the government they wanted after the election, they pushed for a national unity government that took all of Iraq’s political problems and put them into the government,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on national security issues at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “There is a widespread recognition now among American officials that inclusiveness over effectiveness was a mistake.”

The tensions between the men have fueled the simmering sectarian issues.

Although Mr. Allawi worked with the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party, members of Mr. Maliki’s party have lately denigrated him by calling him a Baathist — a deadly insult given the abuse that Shiites like Mr. Maliki and Mr. Allawi sustained at the hands of the Sunni-dominated Baathist inner circle.

“He practices what the Baathists used to do,” Hussein al-Assadi, a leader of Mr. Maliki’s party, said. “He believes in Baathist principles.”

At a recent protest in Baghdad, Maliki supporters stomped on pictures of Mr. Allawi, called him a terrorist and attacked a group of anti-Maliki protesters with sticks.

The protesters claimed that a picture of Mr. Allawi with a man who security authorities said was behind a gruesome attack on a wedding in 2006 that left 70 people dead proved he was a terrorist himself.

Just a few days after the protest, Mr. Allawi escalated the rhetoric and addressed the nation in a televised speech, claiming that Mr. Maliki had recruited the protesters to defame him. Mr. Allawi also said Mr. Maliki and the members of his party were the “bats of darkness.”

Mr. Maliki’s aides responded by saying they were going to sue Mr. Allawi and would have him removed from Parliament for refusing to show up.

“Countries that had civil conflicts like Iraq fall back into civil wars all the time,” Dr. Pollack said. “You need progress in the political system to get out of the civil war track. If the political process doesn’t work, people get frustrated and resort to violence. I think we have to look at the increasing violence as potentially the beginning of that very dangerous process.”

Duraid Adnan and Omar al-Jawoshy contributed reporting.


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