Juan Cole, author of Engaging the Muslim World, discusses the void in Iraqi politics created by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim’s death, Al-Maliki’s failure to reconcile with Sunni nationalist groups, shifting coalitions within the United Iraqi Alliance and the overstated increase in Iraqi violence since the U.S. troop pullback
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Our next guest on the show today is Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, author of Engaging the Muslim World, and author of the great blog, Informed Comment, at JuanCole.com.
Welcome back to the show, Juan.
How are you doing?
Thanks so much for having me, Scott.
Well, I appreciate you coming back on to share your expertise with us today, and particularly about what's going on in Iraq.
First, give us just a rundown about the Hakeem clan and then why it's so important that its leader, its patriarch, Abdul Aziz al-Hakeem, has died, and then get into maybe what that really means for the future of Iraq, do you think?
Well, back in the 1960s, the supreme religious authority for Iraqi Shiites was Mohsen al-Hakeem.
He was the predecessor, among others, of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who now holds that position.
And his sons went into politics.
They opposed the Ba'ath regime of Saddam Hussein, and ended up being killed in some numbers, his sons and nephews.
And some of them went to Iran, where they helped to form the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
And the original idea of that was to have an umbrella organization for Iraqi Shiite religious activists, who were also political and wanted to overthrow the Ba'ath regime.
Muhammad Bakr al-Hakeem emerged as the leader of that group.
His younger brother, Abdul Aziz al-Hakeem, formed and led a paramilitary, the Butter Corps, which was armed and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and which would go over from Iran into Iraq and blow things up, assassinate people, and so forth.
When the United States overthrew the Ba'ath regime in 2003, the al-Hakeems went back to Iraq from Iran, and established themselves as leaders of probably the foremost Shiite religious party, which dominated Iraq in the 2005 parliamentary elections and thereafter.
So Muhammad Bakr al-Hakeem was killed in an explosion in 2003, and was succeeded as an overall leader of the movement by Abdul Aziz.
Abdul Aziz had put together the Shiite coalition that dominated parliament, that gave us these Shiite religious prime ministers, and his Butter Corps, or paramilitary, was important to the formation of the new Iraqi security forces.
So his death has left a gaping hole in the midst of Shiite religious politics in Iran.
By the way, and I guess this is just a parenthesis, or maybe it's the point, but how powerful is what was the Butter Corps, the private army of the Supreme Islamic Council, now that it is, I think there was a time we used to kind of joke, you know, the Iraqi army, aka the Butter Corps, but is that still true?
Well, you know, these things are awfully difficult to discover from the outside.
The Iraqi press maintains that a lot of the Butter Corps paramilitary was inducted into the army by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and that it is a kind of skeleton or backbone for the Iraqi security forces.
Other Butter Corps members were inducted into the special police commandos of the Ministry of Interior, sort of a kind of armed and militant FBI.
So they seem to be playing a role inside formal Iraqi institutions.
They still do have their own separate identity.
I suspect some of them have shifted their allegiance from the al-Hakims to the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which may help to explain how he has gradually gotten hold of control of some of the security forces.
Well, and now he's from the Dawah Party, which was sort of allied with the Supreme Islamic Council, but I guess, well, and Jafari before him was there too.
Now, was it just because America insisted they wanted a Dawah Party guy, not a Supreme Islamic Council guy, or it's because Dawah needed, basically, you needed somebody inside the Shiite alliance who could split the difference between Muqtada al-Sadr and his crew, versus the Supreme Islamic Council, and there was the Dawah Party, had no army, so they were kind of the compromised choice between the Sadrists on one hand and the Supreme Islamic Council on the other.
Is that a bit too elementary there?
No, I think that's about right.
The Islamic Mission Party, or the Dawah, was the oldest of the political religious parties among the Shiites, founded around 1957.
It wasn't clerically dominated, it was led by laypeople, physicians and lawyers and so forth, and was part of this Shiite religious party coalition that took over Iraq in 2005.
And I think initially they were reluctant to have someone like Abdulaziz al-Hakim, who's a cleric, and you see him in the newspapers, and he's got the turban and the robes, I think that would have, having him lead Iraq, would have presented a difficulty with regard to the imagery of the thing, for both the Bush administration and for Iraq and the Arab world.
Well, there was that guy al-Mahdi, who was the SCIRIS candidate for Prime Minister, right?
Well, yes, Adel Abdel-Mahdi is the Vice President now, and he was a contender for Prime Minister.
People in Iraq don't think of him as SCIRI, he has a background in leftist politics before he turned religious.
Some Sunnis say that they trust him more because they think he could see more than one side of an argument, if he's had all those different identities.
But the Islamic Supreme Council, just in the last parliamentary internal battle, just was outvoted by a coalition of the Islamic Mission Party and the Sadrists.
And now in the recent provincial elections, the Islamic Supreme Council of the Al-Hakims took a bath.
They had controlled Baghdad, they had a number of southern provinces under their control, and they did very poorly.
They got between 9 and 18% of the vote in these southern provinces, whereas they had been the leading party before.
So the party is in a little bit of disarray, and Abdel Aziz's son, Ammar, has emerged as the leader of it, but he's only 40, and he's not seasoned.
So there's a real question of what will happen, and so far al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, is refusing to join in with the big Shiite party coalition for these elections.
He seems to want to go alone.
Well, now, there was some reporting about, I think, kind of a reordering of the Shiite alliance, where it was now the Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council united against the Dawah party, which I always thought that there was a pretty big direction of the way things ought to be, a difference in opinion between the Sadrists, who were very kind of Arabist and nationalist, versus the Supreme Islamic Council types, who were more in bed with Iran and wanted to spin off the South.
And, of course, you can never rely on the New York Times or whatever to kind of tell this straight, because there's always things they're trying to keep from you, like, America's the one who's installed the Iranians in power, so we've got no right to bitch about it.
Right, well, you know, the coalition of Shiite parties that's come together really is a reassembling of the people who were allies in the December 2005 parliamentary election.
So it's not unprecedented.
The Sadrists ran alongside the Islamic Supreme Council then.
They don't all agree with each other on all policies.
They are religious parties, you know, they represent the Iraqi religious right.
They're not big on liquor stores or video stores, and they kind of have a puritanical view of politics.
And, you know, yes, the Sadr movement people are more kind of street-level Iraqis, a lot of them poor, and they have an Iraqi-Arab nationalism to them.
But they also, you know, have fairly good relations with Iran, and Muqtada Sadr, their leader, is in Iran studying.
So the differences amongst them are, you know, not such as to prevent them from allying for political purposes to try to maintain control of parliament.
And what really happened, I think, in January in the provincial elections was that al-Maliki heads a religious party, but he didn't really campaign on religion.
His campaign had more of a nationalist tone to it.
You couldn't call it secular, and a lot of the people who won under his party rubric were religious people.
But it was more nationalist, and it did very well in Basra and Baghdad.
It got over a third of the votes in both places.
So it put the Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council and the other Shiite parties on notice that just appealing to kind of general Shiite themes doesn't cut it anymore.
The Iraqis want to hear what you're going to do for Iraq.
And so I think that's why they've come back together.
They're calling their alliance the Iraqi National Alliance this time.
And they still hold out hope that they'll get al-Maliki to join in with them.
The largest party or party coalition in parliament gets to form the government.
And I figure in the Shiite South, the Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council, the al-Hakims and the Muqtada al-Sadr people, they got on the order of 40-42% in most of the Shiite southern provinces, if you count up all the people who are in this coalition now.
And I think that they'd be in a position to form the government.
I'm a little puzzled as to why al-Maliki thinks that he could put together a coalition that would be bigger.
And the only way I could see he could do that would be if he joined in with the Sunnis.
And some of the Sunnis he won't, because they're expathists.
So I don't know.
My own suspicion is that al-Maliki might well get roped back into the Shiite coalition.
Well, and that is a major sticking point.
And I guess it kind of ties into the next question, which is, who's doing the truck bombing?
And what's responsible for the fact that this last month was the highest casualties in, I forgot how long.
In about a year.
Although the numbers are so small that you can't really find a trend here.
Actually, the first month after the U.S. stopped patrolling the cities, July, the number of attacks and the number of deaths fell by about a third.
And in August, they were up by about a fifth over June, which was the last month the U.S. was in control.
So it's not statistically significant.
But there were some big bombings in August that they were a result in some part of al-Maliki being cocky.
He thought those bombings were mainly against the U.S.
And so once he had gotten the U.S. to agree to leave, he thought that they would trail off.
And so he started taking down the checkpoints and the blast walls, which Iraqis really didn't like.
And it makes your life miserable to have to be stopping at checkpoints all the time.
But he took them down in front of the government ministries, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
And the Sunni Arab guerrillas, I blame for this, they are still vital.
And they saw an opportunity and they went for it.
They got high-powered explosives and it was now easy to do.
They just got the trucks in there and blew off the facade of the building.
But I think al-Maliki and the military learned their lesson that these guerrillas are not just after the U.S.
They don't want this new Shiite-dominated government to establish itself and be stable.
And al-Maliki is convinced that they planned this thing out from Syria.
And he can't get Syria to turn the people he suspects of doing it over to Iraq.
They're Iraqi expatriates who ran away to Syria.
So the bombings have provoked a diplomatic fight between Iraq and Syria.
Turkey stepped in to try to mediate it.
But the al-Maliki government thinks that the Sunni Arab dissidents, whether Baathists or radical Muslim fundamentalists, were behind this.
Some of the Sunnis, though, tend to blame Iran for it, which really doesn't make any sense.
Because the ministries that were hit were controlled by Iranian clients.
So I can't see the logic of hitting their own clients.
Now, if you're al-Maliki at this point, don't you want to pay off and bribe the so-called Awakening Council guys?
Because this was what Petraeus did as he finally agreed to pay these guys off, which is what they'd been asking for for years and years at that point.
And so they quit fighting against the Americans for the most part and did these Awakening Councils and everything.
But it seems to me like if he's not going to integrate them into the army, then he's going to be bombed by them over and over again.
Well, yeah, this is a problem.
Al-Maliki was always against that policy of Petraeus and the other American officers of essentially bribing the Sunni Arabs not to fight the Americans.
And he felt like if you establish these Sunni Arab groups, allow them to get weapons, do patrols, fight the fundamentalists the U.S. calls Al-Qaeda, that you're basically creating Sunni gangs, which sooner or later are going to be a problem for Iraqi security.
So he was against it and he stiffed them.
He's supposed to be paying them now, about 100,000 of them.
He was supposed to bring a lot of them into the Iraqi security forces.
He's not doing it.
Their pay is in arrears and Maliki just doesn't want them in the army.
He's afraid they'll make a coup if they get in.
And once they're not getting any support anymore from the U.S., they've taken on very dangerous people.
So the Sunni Awakening Council members are getting assassinated.
One was killed just yesterday because they're no longer in a position to even defend themselves.
So yeah, Maliki has not pursued genuine reconciliation with the more nationalist of the Sunnis.
And this is a problem for him going forward.
And these bombings are a sign that there are a lot of people that still are not reconciled to the new government in Iraq.
All right, now I'm sorry.
Please let me ask you one more question.
I'll let you go.
What do you make of the various generals and so forth talking about, Ah, gee, security's starting to slip.
Looks like we might have to stay longer or go back into the cities here and there.
Seems like there's some trial balloons.
The Pentagon doesn't want to leave Iraq.
Are they going to leave anyway?
Yeah, I think they're going to be forced to leave.
I mean, I know some of the officers have a lot invested in Iraq.
They've seen their guys die to achieve things there.
And they're afraid if the U.S. military leaves Iraq that it'll fall into Iran's orbit.
So there are a lot of reasons for which they want to keep a hand in.
But I think they're just going to have to suck it up and leave.
You know, people forget that the Filipino Senate voted in 1989 for the U.S. Navy to leave Subic Bay.
And by God, if they weren't gone.
These things depend on bilateral treaties.
And the bilateral treaty the United States has with Iraq specifies all troops out by the end of 2011.
I think Obama wants them out.
He doesn't have the resources.
He's already running a big budget deficit.
He's got Afghanistan on his plate.
How are we going to go on spending $9 billion a year in Iraq?
I don't think the American people want that.
And then the Iraqis don't want us there.
The parliament only agreed to a status of forces agreement with the proviso that it contain a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.
And the Sadrists and some other popular militia forces have laid down their arms on the grounds that the U.S. has agreed to leave.
If it looked like it was staying, you'd have the return of violence.
So I just don't think it's tenable.
The U.S. will be out.
They've got 1.5 million pieces of equipment to move.
They're already putting them on trucks and taking them out to Aqaba in Jordan or down to Kuwait.
Getting the troops out is not really a big logistical problem.
130,000 troops could be moved out over a year and a half.
But there's a lot of equipment.
A lot of people will be left for the Iraqi military.
Well, it's that year and a half that I worry about.
Because it seems like the whole withdrawal is back-loaded.
Where a year and a half goes by and then we're going to start to leave.
And then we have another year and a half to leave.
And I'm thinking, man, that's a lot of different excuses to stay and be dreamed up between now and then.
Well, I agree.
But actually, I don't think it's exactly like that.
The likelihood is, from what I read, that after the January parliamentary elections, assuming they're held then, the rationale for keeping so many troops in Iraq is that the U.S. military locks down the country for the elections.
Otherwise, they couldn't be held.
The voters would just be blown up.
So if you're going to have these elections, the U.S. military still needs to be there to provide the security for them.
And that will kind of be its last gift to Iraq, is that it will lock down the country for three days, let the elections happen in a relatively free and fair way, try to avoid Iran stealing the elections in various ways, or militias intimidating people.
But then if they happen in January as they're scheduled, my understanding is that you're going to start seeing whole brigades come out in February and March.
And by next year this time, as we speak, there will only be 40,000 to 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and they won't be categorized as camp combat troops at that point.
So this thing, you're going to see a massive troop movement over the next 12 months, Scott, and I'm convinced it's going to happen.
Right on.
Well, we'll be watching for it.
I can't help but be skeptical, but no, you make a great argument, and I really appreciate you tolerating me keeping you late like this.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
It's always great talking.
Okay, thank you very much for your time today.
Sure.
All right, y'all, that's Wong Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, and he writes the blog Informed Comment at WongCole.com.
His latest book is called Engaging the Muslim World.
