Abadi No Quisling: Tough Times Ahead for Uncle Sam's Iraq Project

The idea all along has been to partition Iraq. That was clear as soon as ISIS took Mosul last June and the Kurds, in what could be termed a collaboration, took Kirkuk.

The U.S. response to black-clad jihadis massacring over 1,000 conscripts near Tikrit, you will recall, was laid back. The primary concern of the Obama administration was not to prevent further genocide; rather, it was to make sure that Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, relinquish control of the government, something that was difficult to imagine since al-Maliki's State of Law Coalition was by far the top vote-getter in last April's election.

But with ISIS on a warpath to Baghdad and the United States reticent to provide assistance (the corrupt Bob Menendez from his leadership perch on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee promised to block weapons transfers to Iraq as long as al-Maliki remained prime minister), the State Department's man in Mesopotamia, Brett McGurk, was able to engineer a soft coup. Maliki was replaced by a candidate, Haider al-Abadi,  from Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party. Abadi, educated in England, was deemed suitably pro-Western in outlook, and, more importantly, he appeared to accept U.S. diktats regarding a de facto partition of Iraq -- more autonomy for the regions with a national guard system set up whereby the sects would be formally and institutionally militarized, as well as the ministries of defense and interior being awarded to Sunnis.

Then something happened. ISIS jumped the rails and went after areas under Kurdish control. The Yazidis were massacred on Mount Sinjar and Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, was threatened, not to mention there was the potential for ISIS to blow Mosul Dam and create a humanitarian catastrophe.

All of this got the U.S. off the sidelines, dispatching warplanes for numerous bombing runs. ISIS responded with well-publicized snuff films of American reporters James Foley and Steve Sotloff. This hardened U.S. opposition to Islamic State, which prior to August 2014 was not very pronounced; one might call it a studied ignorance.

But since the end of last summer, a combination of U.S. air power working in concert with Kurdish and Iranian-backed Shiite militias has halted the Islamic State offensive, with the exception of Sunni-dominated Anbar Province.

Now the anti-ISIS alliance appears to be fraying, as longtime Syria hand Anne Barnard reports in "Iraqi Campaign to Drive ISIS From Tikrit Reveals Tensions With U.S.":

Since the Islamic State swept into Iraq in June, Iran and the United States, longtime enemies that both support the Iraqi government, have maintained an uneasy de facto alliance against the group, with the United States-led coalition unleashing airstrikes, and Shiite militias aligned with Iran fighting alongside army and Kurdish forces on the ground. There have also been growing reports of Iranian forces’ directly joining the fight within Iraq. 

The Americans’ discomfort has grown as Mr. Abadi’s government has been unable to mobilize significant Sunni forces to join the fight, something that American officials consider crucial to breaking the Islamic State’s hold on many heavily Sunni areas.

For their part, Iraqi officials increasingly complain that American support has not been as robust as Iran’s. Many Iraqis resent what they see as American squeamishness about the militias, which by all accounts have been crucial to holding back the Islamic State after regular army units fled its assault. 

“Americans consider us a militia that does not represent the government, while we are defending the country and helping the government,” said Mueen al-Kadhimy, a leader in the Badr Organization, a prominent militia. “We are the people of Iraq.”

The Tikrit offensive could prove to be a first step toward driving back the Islamic State, or it could deepen longstanding sectarian and political divides that the militants have exploited to win support from some Iraqi Sunnis and acquiescence from others. The group has also used brutal intimidation tactics against Sunnis who reject it or support the government in Baghdad.

But at the same time, Shiite militias have been accused of reprisals against the Sunni population, many of whom regard them with suspicion and fear.

The Tikrit operation is the Iraqis’ first attempt to seize the area since June, when Islamic State militants massacred more than 1,000 Iraqi Shiite soldiers as they fled a nearby military base, Camp Speicher. There have been fears that Shiite militia members from the same areas many of the soldiers hailed from could take revenge on local Sunnis if they enter Tikrit, and some militia leaders have openly called the assault a revenge operation.

“There’s a risk there,” said one senior American military official, expressing concern that the Iraqi operations might not pay sufficient attention to the risks of civilian casualties from indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire.

But the American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing battle, acknowledged that if the Iraqis and their Iranian advisers maintained strict controls on their targeting and the operation resulted in “fewer ISIS fighters and chasing them from Tikrit, that’s not unhelpful.”

Clearly the U.S. is sitting out the Tikrit operation not at the behest of its military planners who see the advantage of an offensive tying Islamic State fighters down (as they were tied down and dealt a significant defeat in Kobani). The U.S. military is sitting out the Tikrit offensive because U.S. political leadership, which answers to the Saudis and the Israelis, cannot abide any Shiite victory.

The U.S. goal all along -- to appease Tel Aviv and Riyadh -- has been to keep Iraq fractured. If Iraq can be united under Shiite leadership with Iranian assistance this will be the U.S. plan stood on its head. The quisling Abadi will turn out to be a true Iraqi patriot.