Iraq’s new prime minister may, like his predecessor, be a Shia Islamist politician from the Dawa party, but he is more pragmatic and less sectarian than the man he replaces.
That was the international media consensus in 2006, when Nouri Al Maliki was voted in to replace Ibrahim Al Jaafari, Iraq’s first democratically elected prime minister. Mr Al Jaafari’s hardline sectarian instincts were blamed for the failure to forge a post-Saddam Hussein national consensus that would unite Shias, Sunnis and Kurds and put an end to the insurgency and the civil war that was taking hold.
But today, Mr Al Jaafari is a forgotten man. It’s Mr Al Maliki who has, for years, been blamed by frustrated domestic and international stakeholders for the failure of the national project to avert the forces incarnated by the Islamic State insurgency and, as ever, the independence-minded Kurdish Regional Government (KRG).
And so, today – in an echo of eight years ago – the hype from politicians and media outlets in distant capitals holds that Mr Al Maliki’s replacement by Haider Al Abadi is the key to reversing the unravelling of post-Saddam Iraq. That hype has it that: the Kurds can be persuaded that their future lies with Baghdad; the Sunni Arabs can be persuaded to rise up and expel the Islamic Front from their midst, as the new man in Baghdad welcomes them back into a power-sharing arrangement; and Iraq will boldly go into a new future that somehow manages to satisfy the visions of foreign stakeholders from Tehran, the Gulf and Washington who have endorsed Mr Al Maliki’s ouster.
The grievances with Mr Al Maliki – his sectarianism, his autocratic and authoritarian tendency to monopolise control of the security forces and use them against his political opponents, and the sheer ineptitude and paralysis that had set in over his eight years in charge – were real and widely held. That was why, by the end, he had no support base either inside or outside Iraq.
But the fact that Mr Al Maliki ultimately conceded and allowed a peaceful transition in Baghdad was a reminder that however poor his record of governance had been, he was not a Saddam Hussein-style personality-cult dictator.
The urgency of replacing him had been underscored by the fall of vast swathes of northern Iraq to the Islamic State – a self-appointed “caliphate” whose sense of its own domain makes nonsense of the Sykes-Picot borders that created the modern system of Arab states, but whose fantasies are made dangerously real by its growing military capability.
The Islamic State has prompted an unlikely alliance of forces ranging from the US, Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga militaries to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and fighters of the PKK, the Kurdish separatists branded a terrorist organisation by the US. And it was in that context that the same array of forces agreed to get rid of Mr Al Maliki, in the hope that Mr Al Abadi could strengthen the Iraqi state to roll back the Islamic State advance.
It should be obvious that there’s no common strategic agenda uniting the forces fighting Islamic State – Iran, the Kurds, Turkey, the Saudis, the western powers and the Iraqi Shia and Sunni mainstream all have a common foe in a “caliphate” that threatens all their interests, but many of those same forces remain fundamentally divided.
The US is arming the Peshmerga, but the Peshmerga have also taken over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the war against Islamic State and have made it clear that they have no intention of returning it to control by Baghdad – a situation intolerable not only for the Shia parties that have long ruled Iraq, but also for the Sunnis. The US wants the KRG to remain within Iraq, but recent history suggests that even Washington’s closest allies no longer pay much heed to the US when its desires conflict with their own.
The Islamic State insurgency is not a product of Sunni alienation from Mr Al Maliki’s style of governance; it is grounded in a vicious sectarian outlook that has never accepted the principle of Shia rule in Baghdad even if that was the logical outcome of Iraqi democracy.
US air power and a handful of special forces troops on the ground are unlikely to be enough to roll back the Islamic State. Doing that will require substantial numbers of ground troops over a protracted period. The idea that the 2007 Anbar Awakening in which local Sunni tribes made common cause with the US military against Al Qaeda can be repeated is missing the obvious ingredient of a massive American military presence.
The US remains highly unlikely to commit ground forces in Iraq again, not least because there’s no plausible endgame.
And while Mr Al Abadi may surprise everyone, it would not be prudent to bet on that. Whatever history he makes will not be made on terms of his choosing.
If the US military intervention seems halting and uncertain, that’s because Washington lacks a clear exit strategy. Many of the loudest champions of invading Iraq are pushing for more muscular US military intervention, once again on rosy assumptions about a new government in Baghdad.
The problem with the fantasy that replacing Iraq’s prime minister is the key to changing its fate is that since Saddam Hussein’s fall, Iraq’s politics – and its political discord – has been anything but personal. Reversing Iraq’s unravelling will require a new regional consensus among long-standing adversaries for whom Iraq is but one battleground in an increasingly bitter and complex geostrategic contest.
Real progress in Iraq becomes possible only if the consensus over the emergency imperative of rolling back the “caliphate” becomes a basis for new regional security compact.
Tony Karon teaches in the graduate programme in international affairs at the New School in New York