Shadowy Iraqi Office Accused of Sectarian Agenda

Interesting article about a "shadow cabinet" of Maliki advisors who are accused of a sectarian agenda and are replacing non-sectarian Iraqi Army officers.

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Iraq's prime minister has created an entity within his government that U.S. and Iraqi military officials say is being used as a smokescreen to carry out an extreme Shiite agenda that is worsening the country's sectarian divide.

The "Office of the Commander in Chief" has the power to overrule other government ministries, according to U.S. military and intelligence sources.

Those sources say the 24-member office is abusing its power, increasingly overriding decisions made by the Iraqi Ministries of Defense and Interior and potentially undermining the entire U.S. effort in Iraq.

The Office, as it is known in Baghdad, was set up about four months ago with the knowledge of American forces in Iraq. Its goal is ostensibly to advise Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki -- the nation's new commander in chief -- on military matters.

According to a U.S. intelligence source, the Office is "ensuring the emplacement of commanders it favors and can control, regardless of what the ministries want."

A senior Iraqi army officer who is seeking help from the senior U.S. command said: "The Office is not supposed to be taking charge like this. It's overstepping its role as an advisory office. It's not a healthy thing to have. It's people with no power who want to have power."

A senior U.S. military official cited several cases in Baghdad in which Iraqi commanders considered capable by the U.S. were detained or forced out of their positions after cracking down on Shiite militias ...

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This should come as a surprise to no one who's been paying attention. Al-Maliki's in hock to the militias and al-Sadr (since al-Sadr is a key to al-Maliki's bloc), al-Maliki's been warning our troops off of the Mahdi Army since he took power, there have been reports for the last two years that the Shi'a politicians were running death squads, and the only reason al-Maliki got his job in the first place was because a) we didn't know anything (negative or positive) about him from his time in the Da'wa Party, b) he was openly complimentary about the coalition presences, and c) Bush will back any Iraqi politician who will openly kiss his ass ( http://www.slate.com/id/2161644/ ).

I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for the mainstream press to put this together.

I go further. I believe that Maliki's government is dead (as it regards the ability to promulgate the democratic experiment in Iraq). There is still time to turn the train, but it must not have Maliki as a passenger.

Sistani, Maliki and Sadr Versus the U.S.

I'd agree with some of your assessment Danny, but I don't think there's anyone out there who's actually capable of doing a better job than al-Maliki...or at least there's no one who the Kurds, Shi'a, Sunnis, and Bush would all accept. Even if there was a leader who was willing to get things done, I sincerely doubt he would be capable of getting anything done with the Iraq government in its current form. And I have my doubts as to whether anyone who could work through the problems would be pro-American enough for Bush to support him...because at this point it appears that an Iraqi politician who is pro-Bush would be unelectable with the Iraqi population (just look what happened to Allawi's coalition in the last elections).

UCrawford,

I understand your points, but nonetheless, Maliki is not pro-U.S. This is one of the thrusts of my post. He only makes the appearances of being pro-U.S., while using this appearance to surreptitiously undermine U.S. interests in Iraq.

One would have hoped that Allawi's recent challenge to Maliki might have gained better traction. Alas, the State Department is married to Maliki.

This is a major problem, but what keeps me awake is the fear that someone is going to exercise the Diem '63 option.

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Originally Posted by Mondor

This is a major problem, but what keeps me awake is the fear that someone is going to exercise the Diem '63 option.

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Bing West has been arguing in favor of this option for quite awhile now.

I wasn't trying to say that al-Maliki is pro-U.S....I seriously doubt that he is. At best the guy's U.S. neutral and simply thoroughly incapable of running the government...I'm more prone to believe that he's pretty much just another Shi'a politician who's not particularly fond of us (they remember what happened to the Shi'a after the first Gulf War) and is in hock to the militias (Badr Corps, SCIRI, Mahdi Army), but he was ingratiating enough to Bush personally that Bush and Rice were willing to give him the job (since they really couldn't stand al-Ja'afari). It doesn't really matter anyway, my point was that we can dump al-Maliki, but there's nobody out there who could do a better job with the Iraqi government in its current form.

Allawi is about as pro-U.S. as the Iraqis get, and he did the best he could while he was in charge, but the Iraqi people don't like or respect him enough to put him in charge...that's why his party got destroyed by the sectarian groups in the elections. There's no one out there who's going to be able to fix the Iraqi government without turning it into a dictatorship like Saddam's. And it's unlikely that the dictator who could pull that off would be pro-U.S.

Plan Puts Only Sunni Terrorists in Crosshairs of Iraqi Army - from my favorite neoconservative rag, the NY SUN.

Yup...that article pretty much summed it up. Those Shi'a politicians in power in the Iraqi government will either give the Shi'a militias a pass because they agree with what the militias are doing, or they'll give them a pass because they know they'll be the militias' next target if they go against them. Either way, the result is the same...in supporting the government our troops are taking sides in a sectarian war that's going to feature a lot of ethnic cleansing for no real payoff for us. I don't like the Dems, but I think Harry Reid nailed it right on the head about the Iraq war.

From MEMRI

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Documents Exposed by Egyptian Government Weekly Indicate Ties Between Iraqi PM and Iranian Revolutionary Guards

To view this Special Dispatch in HTML, visit:
http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD157307.

An investigative article by journalist Mahdi Mustafa, published March 31, 2007 in the Egyptian government weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, featured photographs of documents indicating that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has ties with Muqtada Al-Sadr and with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.(1)

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The dispatch contains translations