Here’s what happened in Iraq while the GOP — with an assist from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) — blocked yesterday’s debate on the war.
The leader of the dominant Shiite political bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, is an Islamist and sectarian hardliner named Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. al-Hakim’s faction, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has been a proxy for Iran since the Iran-Iraq war, and it runs one of the more ruthless Shiite militias in Iraq, known as the Badr Corps — an organization that in 2005 ran Sunni torture chambers out of the Interior Ministry. If al-Hakim has any particular virtue, it’s that he’s also been willing to accept American sponsorship as well: way back in 2002 and 2003, he was an influential member of the Iraqi exile community working with the Bush administration, which rewarded him with a seat on the Iraqi Governing Council.
Yesterday, al-Hakim went to Tehran, where he was warmly received by the head of Iran’s security council, Ali Larijani. He had a mission — to publicly urge U.S.-Iranian diplomatic contact. “Negotiations between Iran and the United States are useful for the whole region,” he was quoted as saying.
There are two points to be made here. The first, narrower point, is that even those Iraqis the U.S. is allied with want a reduction in the level of hostility between Washington and Tehran. That hostility is increasing by the day: the Iranians are blaming the U.S. for the abduction of an Iranian diplomat in Baghdad yesterday, a charge the U.S. denies. The larger point, however, is that the logic of the war is to deliver Iraqi politics into the hands of men who are closer to Tehran than to Washington. Remember that the surge is designed to deliver breathing room for the Iraqi government — a government in the hands of hardline Shiites like al-Hakim. Indeed, Bush welcomed al-Hakim to Washington in December, and according to Sunday’s Washington Post, a faction within the administration considers him more reliable an ally than PM Nouri al-Maliki:
As they put the plan together, officials held heated internal debates over whether Maliki was the right man to head such an effort. Some argued in favor of engineering a new Iraqi government under Maliki’s Shiite coalition partner, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Hakim’s political stalking horse, Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi.
The reason the administration stuck with Maliki? According to an official quoted by the Post, sidelining him in favor of al-Hakim would be “too hard.”
It’s ironic that we’d get a fuller understanding of who really benefits from the surge by a visit to Tehran by an Iraqi ally of the administration, but there it is. Don’t expect that to be debated on the Senate floor any time soon, however.
