For weeks, Bush administration officials have taken turns explaining their lack of confidence in Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and insisting that they’re still on the same page as him. Yesterday, however, in a development that seems infinitely more important that John Kerry flubbing one word in a meaningless joke, Maliki started flexing his muscles in a dangerous way.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki demanded the removal of American checkpoints from the streets of Baghdad on Tuesday, in what appeared to be his latest and boldest gambit in an increasingly tense struggle for more independence from his American protectors. […]
The language of the declaration, which implied that Mr. Maliki had the power to command American forces, seemed to overstep his authority and to be aimed at placating his Shiite constituency.
The withdrawal was greeted with jubilation in the streets of Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite enclave where the Americans have focused their manhunt and where anti-American sentiment runs high.
Maliki doesn’t have “command” over U.S. troops, but our soldiers abandoned all the positions in eastern and central Baghdad they had set up just as soon Iraqis told them to.
To be sure, the checkpoints had apparently caused practical and logistical problems for life in Baghdad, but they were created for a reason — we were searching for a missing American soldier.
And what about that search now?
The move lifted a near siege that had stood at least since last Wednesday. U.S. military police imposed the blockade after the kidnapping of an American soldier of Iraqi descent. The soldier’s Iraqi in-laws said they believed he had been abducted by the Mahdi Army as he visited his wife at her home in the Karrada area of Baghdad, where U.S. military checkpoints were also removed as a result of Maliki’s action.
The crackdown on Sadr City had a second motive, U.S. officers said: the search for Abu Deraa, a man considered one of the most notorious death squad leaders. The soldier and Abu Deraa both were believed by the U.S. military to be in Sadr City.
Moktada al-Sadr wanted the time-consuming checkpoint searches to stop, Maliki ordered it, and we slunk away, as ordered by the Iraqi government. It all sounds rather humiliating.
Sullivan captured the larger dynamic nicely.
The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing. The soldier appears to be of Iraqi descent who is married to an Iraqi woman. Who authorized abandoning him to the enemy? Who is really giving the orders to the U.S. military in Iraq? These are real questions about honor and sacrifice and a war that is now careening out of any control. They are not phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine to appeal to emotions to maintain power.
And where, by the way, is McCain on this? Silent on Cheney’s “no-brainer” on waterboarding. Silent recently on Iraq. But vocal – oh, how vocal – on Kerry. It tells you something about what has happened to him. And to America.
On the other hand, Kevin Drum suggested Maliki probably did us a favor by “giving us an excuse to back down yesterday…. The military set up the cordon because they didn’t want to simply do nothing, but then had to stick with it forever because anything less would show a ‘lack of resolve.’ In a way, Maliki rescued us from our own folly on Tuesday.”
This isn’t nearly as important as Kerry’s anti-Bush joke, right?