Iraq Selects A New Leader

Commentary by Robert Tracinski
The New Intellectual Magazine (TIA)
April 25, 2006

Who Is Jawad al-Maliki? Having forced out Muqtada al-Sadr front man Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Iraq's politicians have selected a new prime minister—but they selected him from Jaafari's own Islamist party. So will the new man, Jawad al-Maliki, support a crackdown on Shiite militias? His statements so far are equivocal, and his record doesn't look enormously promising, but information is so far is very sketchy.

Amir Taheri provides the most complete profile of Maliki I have seen yet, though Taheri can sometimes be too sanguine about "moderate" Islamists. It does look as if Maliki is less anti-American and less pro-Iranian than Jaafari—but probably not enough to vigorously suppress the militias. That's why we need to take the war to Iran, rather than trying to suppress the symptoms of Iranian aggression in Iraq.

"Iraq's (Reluctant) New Leader," Amir Taheri, New York Post, April 24 Little is known about him outside a tiny circle of experts on Iraqi politics…. Al-Maliki has always tried to stay in the shadows. Just a few weeks ago, he was even thinking of distancing himself from active politics to focus on his literary projects.…

When still in secondary school in the 1970s, Al-Maliki joined the group led by the late Shiite philosopher Sahib Dakhil al-Najafi, who became a founder of the Al-Dawa….

[Maliki's] 20-year sojourn in Iran is marked by two major, and contradictory, features. First, he emerged as the leader of the party's most radical wing and the founder of its military branch, Jihadieh (The Holy Warriors). This was created by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard as one of several Iraqi Shiite militias Iran used in its long war against Saddam's Iraq.

Does that make al-Maliki an "Iranian candidate," as his enemies have suggested? No—in fact, throughout his time in Iran, al-Maliki was the leader of the "Arab branch" of al-Dawa—as opposed to its pro-Iranian branch.

In 2002, as the United States and its Coalition allies prepared for military intervention in Iraq, the party's pro-Iranian wing, led by al-Jaafari, totally ruled out any contact, let alone cooperation with the Americans. But al-Maliki's pro-Arab wing initiated just such contacts, first in Abu Dhabi and then in Washington. He then participated in the multiparty conference that discussed the future of Iraq in London. (Al-Jaafari boycotted.)