RIGHT UP TO YOUR FACE AND DIS YOU. National security adviser Steve Hadley is in Iraq today to deliver a message to the disobedient administration of PM Nouri al-Maliki: He wishes "to reinforce some of the things you have heard from our president." That being, in general, "Can't you just do as we say? You know, be a 'leader'? Disband the militias? Secure the country? Let us get some soldiers home, or at least announce something by, say, November 6?" Maliki opted instead to do the expected thing: Force the U.S. to end its five-day siege of Sadr City, the Baghdad stronghold of Maliki ally and U.S. enemy Moqtada al-Sadr. In times past -- those halcyon days of ex-premiers Iyad Allawi and Ibrahim Jaafari -- there was a temptation to say that the U.S. was ginning up crises in order to have the Iraqi leader demonstrate his independence from America and thereby win some hearts and minds. This, however, is much different: the Bush administration, after investing much desperation-slash-hope in Maliki, is apparently kicking around the idea of a coup. Coups, as we learned with Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, rarely go in their intended direction. More often than not, they reveal a basic strategic confusion: that a mucked-up situation is really the fault of one unsavory or weak leader. The deterioration of Iraq from Jaafari to Maliki shows this plainly: No Shiite leader is going to dissolve the militias -- even if anyone came up with a way to actually do that -- upon which the Shiites depend for survival; each sect has decided it has a greater interest in war rather than negotiation; etc. Hadley can lean on Maliki all he wants, but Maliki knows one thing: he may not have enough power to rule Iraq, but he has more than enough power to frustrate his would-be American masters.
--Spencer Ackerman
