Iraq: Pulled Out Or Pushed Out
By Robert Dreyfuss
03/12/07 "TomPaine" - 03/09/07 -- Two parliaments, half a world
away from each other, struggled with calls to end the war in
Iraq yesterday. In Washington, Democrats in the U.S. Congress
ended weeks of squabbling to settle on the outlines of a
legislative plan to end the war no later than August, 2008, and
perhaps sooner. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, a new constellation of
political parties is beginning to take shape in the Iraqi
parliament, united around the idea of asking U.S. forces to
leave Iraq as soon as possible. Tremendous obstacles stand in
the way of pro-peace forces both in Congress and in Iraq’s
parliament, but if I had to guess, I’d bet that the Iraqis will
ask the United States to get out of Iraq long before Congress
can force the issue.
Most congressional progressives and members of the Out of Iraq
Caucus aren’t thrilled with the plan cobbled together by Speaker
Nancy Pelosi. Even so, let’s give credit where credit is due.
Four months after an election in which American voters went to
the polls to demand an end to the war, the Democrats responded
by proposing a timetable to do just that, calling for the
withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2007 if President Bush
can’t certify that the Iraqi government is meeting a series of
specific benchmarks, and by August 2008 even if those benchmarks
are met.
The Democratic House leadership is: facing a nearly unified
Republican caucus in both the House and Senate opposed to any
weakening of the U.S. role in Iraq; threatened by a promised
White House veto; and dragged down by the anchor of several
dozen conservative, Blue Dog Democrats afraid to challenge
President Bush over the war. Nevertheless, House leaders have
probably done about the best they could. It won’t satisfy
anti-war activists, who’ll have to redouble efforts to turn up
the heat on the congressional Dems. And it hasn’t exactly won
plaudits from congressional progressives, who are pressing their
own plan to force a more definitive exit, and sooner, by making
more aggressive use of the power of the purse to force a
withdrawal by the end of 2007—even though most of them are
likely to hold their noses and vote for Pelosi’s watered-down
plan, too.
But the harsh reality of the American political system, in which
the White House holds most of the cards—from its veto power to
the president’s role as commander in chief—means that Congress
is playing politics, not making policy. To be sure, it’s good
politics: over the next 18 months or so, the Democrats can draw
a sharp distinction between their support for a withdrawal
deadline and the president’s obsessive insistence on escalating
the war. That, in turn, can help guarantee that the November
2008 election results in another Democratic landslide. A recent
USA Today poll showed that a stunning 77 percent of Americans
favor bringing U.S. troops home if the Iraqi government fails to
end the civil-war violence there. But the House legislation
isn’t likely to become law. Nor is an anti-war resolution in the
Senate, where the Republicans are planning a filibuster to stop
it.
And so, at least as far as Congress is concerned, the war will
go on. True, Democrats might find a reservoir of courage that
will enable them to conduct the kind of full-court press on Iraq
that’s needed to end the carnage there. And true, if enough
Republicans in Congress stopped acting like suicidal lemmings
running over the Iraq War cliff and defected to the peace camp,
the war would end quickly. But neither of those seems likely.
While Congress may be stymied, however, something important is
happening in Iraq.
Few Americans pay attention to Iraqi politics, but over the past
few days something has occurred that could change the course of
the war. For the first time since the Iraqi election of 2005, a
coalition of Sunni and Shiite Arab parties and leaders is
starting to take shape, across the sectarian divide that has
fueled the civil war. It began two days ago, with the
announcement by the Fadhila (Islamic Virtue) party that it is
leaving the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), to become an
independent political party.
With 15 seats in the Iraqi parliament and with a significant
grassroots base throughout the Shiite areas of southern Iraq,
Fadhila is a nationalist party committed to the idea of a
unitary Iraqi state. It is opposed to the breakup of Iraq into
regions or statelets. And its leader, Nadim al-Jaberi, is
explicitly opposed to sectarianism. He is committed to reaching
out to Sunni parties and secular groups to find common ground,
and a new political coalition. Most important, like most of the
Sunni parties in Iraq, al-Jaberi and Fadhila support the rapid
withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.
Fadhila is currently negotiating with Sunni and secular
parties—including the Sunni religious bloc, a quasi-Baathist
Sunni nationalist party and the secular Iraq National List led
by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi—on the formation of a new
Sunni-Shiite-secular bloc in Iraq that would have nearly 100
votes in the 270-member Iraqi parliament.
Not only that, but Fadhila is a “Sadrist” party, whose origins
lie in loyalty to the powerful Sadr clerical family. Fadhila is
not loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the thirty-something mullah who
leads the Mahdi Army. But there are enough ties between Fadhila
and the Mahdi Army that perhaps Muqtada’s own bloc could be
persuaded to join the emerging new coalition, too. (Late last
year, Muqtada’s party pulled out of the Iraqi government, and
according to Iraqi insiders Sadr is also talking to the same
nationalist, Sunni and secular forces about the creation of a
new “government of national salvation.”) Along with a handful of
independent Shiite members of parliament, that would give the
new coalition enough power in parliament to have a vote of no
confidence in hapless U.S. ally Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki,
topple his government and then reconstitute a nationalist Iraqi
government that could ask for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Even part of the ruling Dawa party, Maliki’s own party, is said
to favor the idea.
Yesterday, members of the Iraqi parliament representing all of
those parties—Fadhila, Allawi’s bloc and the Sunni parties—held
an unprecedented teleconference with a dozen members of
Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, an event organized by
Representative Jim McDermott (D.-Wash.). Fadhila’s Nadim al-Jaberi
took part in the teleconference, and he minced no words.
“Putting a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops is a very
important step in giving Iraqis confidence that the occupation
will end,” he said. Jaberi also added that by quitting the UIA,
Fadhila has permanently splintered the Shiite bloc. “We have
opened a very wide door in redrawing the Iraqi political map,”
he said, hinting that Muqtada al-Sadr’s party might walk through
that door and join the new bloc.
Other Iraqi parliamentarians, including Saleh Mutlaq of the
Iraqi National Dialogue Front, along with representatives of the
Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni) and the Iraq National List, also took
part in the teleconference with Jaberi. All called for the
withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, along with emergency
efforts to reconstitute a new Iraqi government and to rebuild
the Iraqi armed forces.
The emerging new Iraqi coalition is fragile, and it could easily
fall apart or fall victim to intensified sectarian warfare. Many
obstacles lie in its way, including the attitude of the Kurds,
the opposition of the powerful Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and other factors—including, of
course, the machinations of the United States and its ambassador
in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. But it’s at least possible that by
the summer a new government could start taking shape in Baghdad,
one that could (among other things) assert its nationalist
credentials by demanding a timetable for a U.S. pullout.
President Bush, of course, would do everything he could to
prevent the emergence of such a new coalition in Iraq, including
possibly the use of military force against its leaders. Unlike
with Nancy Pelosi’s legislation, however, at least the White
House can’t veto something that the Iraqi parliament passes.
Robert Dreyfuss is an Alexandria, Va.-based writer specializing
in politics and national security issues. He is the author of
Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash
Fundamentalist Islam , a contributing editor at The Nation and a
writer for Mother Jones, The American Prospect and Rolling
Stone. He can be reached through his website,
www.robertdreyfuss.com.
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