Al-Maliki must seek unity

Few Iraqis will look back upon 2013 with any pleasure. Moreover they will be viewing the new year with rising apprehension as under the aberrant leadership of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, their country slips into ever greater violence and confusion.
The old year saw more than 7,800 people die in sectarian violence, a great many of them at the hands of Al-Qaeda bombers and, in the closing months, of returning death squads.
Some commentators believe that western Iraq’s Anbar province, which is dominated by Sunnis, is on the brink of rebellion against Baghdad. Certainly the attack by the Iraqi army and security forces on what was basically a year-long peaceful protest in the city of Ramadi, which left some 13 people dead and dozens injured, has further inflamed local opinion. Some 40 Sunni MPs have announced their resignation from the Parliament in Baghdad.
Iranian sources are claiming that Ramadi and another Sunni stronghold, Fallujah, are now largely controlled by Al-Qaeda-linked groups, specifically The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The government has published footage of an aerial missile strike on what they claim was an ISIL command post in Anbar province. Yesterday Iranian sources claimed that Iraqi “counterterrorism” forces killed a key Al-Qaeda leader Shaker Wahib.
Nowhere in this escalating crisis is there any sign of the Al-Maliki government seeking to reach out, to either the Sunni community, or indeed to the increasingly independent-minded Kurds in the north of the country. By one analysis, the Iraqi leader is behaving with natural incompetence. He long ago gave up on the idea of a pluralist Iraq, if indeed he ever really embraced the notion. Instead he is allowing the security situation to deteriorate without seeking in any way to restore any dialogue with Iraqi’s other communities. In the process he is prepared to let the terrorists bomb and maim people. The calculation appears to be that anger among the Shiite majority will be turned onto the Sunnis, who are seen as hosting the terrorists, and the Kurds, who are seen as exploiting the weakness of the central state.
He seems oblivious to the idea that ordinary Shiite could in any way blame him for the tidal wave of bloodshed and violence that is rising in the country. Yet there is evidence to suggest that a growing number of people, in what Al-Maliki takes for granted as his own loyal constituency, are now feeling anything but loyal about their leader.
At bottom there is a longing for peace. The National Unity Government approved in December 2010 after inconclusive elections, was supposed to deliver tranquility and the return of prosperity. Yet from the outset, Al-Maliki showed himself uninterested in either the nation or unity. The trial in absentia of Sunni Vice President Tareq Al-Hashimi could not have been better calculated to undermine Sunni confidence in the coalition. The severe stroke suffered by the president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, removed a steadying and wise influence on the prime minister.
However many Shiites are also angered at what is seen as the considerable influence that Tehran is exerting over Al-Maliki. Instead of the longed-for peace, Al-Maliki has quietly involved himself in the Syrian uprising, aiding and abetting Iranian moves to supply and sustain the Assad dictatorship with money, weapons and men. The assumption appears to be that since the Iranians are also largely Shiites, Iraqi Shiites will endorse this dangerous alliance with enthusiasm.
It may be that Al-Maliki has miscalculated. In the gruel ling eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, which ended in 1988, Iraqi Shiites fought bravely alongside their Sunni compatriots in a struggle that, originally at least, was seen as just and necessary. They saw themselves first and foremost as Iraqis and as Arabs, with a proud and independent history that they knew needed defending.
Therefore as the fingerprints of Iran’s clerics appear ever more frequently on policy-making in Baghdad and Al-Maliki is channeled in directions that suit Iranians rather than Iraqis, he could find himself facing a backlash.
While it is clear that the Sunni community must root out the terrorists hiding in their midst, as they did once before in a dramatic contribution to peace ahead of Iraq’s first general election in 2005, Al-Maliki has to end his confrontation and baiting of Iraqi Sunnis. Fresh elections may be too much to ask for at this violent and chaotic time. However a reconstituted government of national unity, that really was national and embraced unity for the sake of the country as a whole, putting aside narrow sectional interests, could just work.