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20 Apr 2008 09:06 pm

Tehran Co-Opts Maliki?

In the intra-Shiite civil war between Maliki and Sadr, it appears that the Iranian regime is now tilting toward Maliki. I don't know what to make of this, except that it reinforces the fact that any Shiite dominated government in Baghdad will be inherently within the sway of Iran, at least more so than an ally of the United States. Here's the money quote:

Whether to counter those allegations or simply because, as many Iraqis have recently speculated, Mr. Sadr’s stock has recently fallen in Iranian eyes, the Iranian ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, on Saturday expressed his government’s strong support for the Iraqi assault on Basra. He even called the militias in Basra “outlaws,” the same term that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has used to describe them.

“The idea of the government in Basra was to fight outlaws,” Mr. Qumi said. “This was the right of the government and the responsibility of the government. And in my opinion the government was able to achieve a positive result in Basra.”

At the same time, Qumi attacked the U.S.-Maliki attempt to wrest control of parts of Sadr City from the Sadrists. I don't know what to make of all this maneuvring, but it does seem to me to reveal the increasing paradoxes of the war we are fighting. George W. Bush's major ally in Iraq is now a favorite of Tehran. Go figure. The defeat of the Sadrist forces could well mean an Ahmadinejad-Maliki axis over a large swathe of Iraq, a state of affairs we will have asked young Americans to risk their lives for. And now you see signs from Rice that U.S. policy is to back the Sunni powers against Iran. Whatever else this war started as, it is now something utterly different. And, at this point, it is increasingly hard to understand what exactly it is designed to achieve.

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