Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s tenure is over
(Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama in Baghdad. Wikipedia)
Iraq’s arch-surviving Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is finally toast. As ISIS Islamist forces drive towards Baghdad, Shi’ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has pulled the plug on him.
Maliki has been prime minister of Iraq for eight years since 2006 and presided over two successive governments. He has been propped up by the United States, without whom he would never have lasted a minute, and has operated with considerable political skill to build support across his own Shiite Muslim majority religious community too. He has enjoyed support from Iran and approved far more lucrative oil deals with China than with the United States, to which he owes everything.
But he has treated the formidable Sunni Muslim minority religious community like dirt and he never for all his paper victories in complicated elections and parliamentary wheeling and dealing ever was remotely credible as a national leader.
That’s why the Iraqi National Army created by the Bush II administration so witlessly, and in which the Obama administration too so rashly trusted, is now falling apart before the attacks of forces sometimes only 10 percent of their numbers.
Maliki was a great operator, the best that Iraq could hope for under the ludicrous Western political sham democracy that Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his ”geniuses” imposed upon it.
This system was acclaimed by the likes of Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol and Thomas Friedman as the shining example for future democracy across the Middle East.
Instead, it is about to become the grave stone and burial mound of their hubristic and childish ambitions.
Right now, ISIS – the Sunni extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is sweeping all before them in Iraq.
ISIS can certainly be seen as the Frankenstein Monster of Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld and company’s Crusade for Democracy.
But it won’t win alone in Iraq — Iran won’t let it. The even greater danger in Iran is the messianic Mehdi army. It is perfectly feasible the two sides, Sunni and Shiite will resolve their differences to create an anti-American Caliphate.
There is a powerful expectation across the Mideast that ISIS will create Khorasan, the Sharia Islamic state that is to be the precursor of the Caliphate.
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Martin Sieff is an editor at Sputnik, the Russian-owned news organization. He is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East (2008), Gathering Storm (2014) and Cycles of Change: The Three Great Eras of American History and the Coming Crisis that will Lead to the Fourth (2014). Follow Martin on: @MartinSieff
May 1, 1998 in The Washington Times Sieff wrote, “Iraq has enough deadly biological agents to kill every human being on earth.”