Iraq To Cut Awakening Loose - Maybe By Nov. 1st

By Cernig

McClatchy's Leila Fadel in Baghdad writes that the Iraqi Shiite-controlled government have given up pretending to like the mostly Sunni Awakening movement which has been so crucial in ( it seems temporarily) reducing violence there.

"We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue. "Many of them were part of al Qaida despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al Qaida."

He said the army was considering setting a Nov. 1 deadline for those militia members who hadn't been absorbed into the security forces or given civilian jobs to give up their weapons. After that, they'd be arrested, he said.

Some militia members say that such a move would force them into open warfare with the government again.

"If they disband us now, I will tell you that history will show we will go back to zero," said Mullah Shahab al Aafi, a former emir, or leader, of insurgents in Diyala province who's the acting commander of 24,000 Sons of Iraq there, 11,000 of whom are on the U.S. payroll. "I will not give up my weapons. I will never give them up, and I will carry my weapon again. If it is useless to talk to the government, I will be forced to carry my weapons and my pistol."

A November 1st deadline would certainly reopen sectarian fighting in adavnce of that deadline - and in advance of US presidential elections where the Republican candidate has staked so much on being right that the Surge had brought definite and lasting peace to the country. But that's pretty much an aside - the real damage would be to the lives and livilyhoods of ordinary Iraqis, who must be wondering why they can't catch a break.

American military officials here have always said that the creation of the Sunni militias was at least as important to the precipitous drop in violence as the presence of 30,000 more U.S. troops, and that incorporating them into the security forces would go a long way toward bringing about the sort of reconciliation needed for long-term stability.

After initially embracing the idea of bringing the militia members into the security forces, however, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki hasn't followed through. A committee that Maliki formed to organize the militias' transition to full-fledged government security troops fell apart and was reconstituted only recently. U.S. officials acknowledge that the hiring of the Sunnis has slowed to a crawl.

U.S. and Iraqi officials agree that the Maliki government never agreed to hire more than 20 percent of the militia members. A Maliki ally said it was unreasonable to expect otherwise.

"All the Americans are doing is paying them just to be quiet," said Haider al Abadi, a leading member of Maliki's Dawa political party and the head of the economic and investment committee in the parliament. The Iraqi government, he said, can't "justify paying monthly salaries to people on the grounds that they are ex-insurgents."

And more to the point - ex-insurgents who won't toe the green Zone elite's line. The insurgents who used to form the militias of ISCI, Badr and the various Sunni Green Zone factions have long been "legitimized" and given their sinecure posts in the security forces.

Colin Kahl, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a centrist policy institute in Washington, who recently visited Iraq, said the dispute over the militias could set the stage for a return of widespread bloodshed, particularly because the Maliki government seemed intent on thwarting the plan.

He noted that of the militia members slated to join the security forces, only 600 have completed the required training. Of those, most are Shiites.

Kahl, who spoke with senior U.S. officials during his visit to Iraq, said that the Iraqi government was providing jobs to the militia members in "humiliating ways." He said former Iraqi army officers were being absorbed as low-level beat cops, and men who saw themselves as the "slayers of al Qaida" were being asked to become plumbers and bricklayers.

"The last time we humiliated thousands of these guys is back in 2003, and we got the insurgency," Kahl said.

But Noor al-Napoleon has been believing his own hype and really thinks his Shiite and Kurdish factions can keep a lid on both the Sunnis and the Sadrists long-term - perhaps even without mainstream Sunni support. Earlier this week the son of Adnan Dulaimi, head of the Sunni Accordance Front, has just been arrested by Maliki's forces.

"I asked them why they are taking him. They said they are preparing charges of terrorism, sectarian killings and displacing people," he told Reuters by telephone.

"My son is a humble man. He does not deal with political things. He only owns a shop selling spare car parts."

Another son of Dulaimi's has been held since last year along with many of the politician's bodyguards who were accused of links to a car bomb ring. Dulaimi has always denied the charges, which were a significant source of sectarian friction.

At the same time, a separate pre-dawn raid by an Iraqi counter-terrorism unit killed the governor of Diyala's  secretary in his own office and arrested a senior provincial council member and the dean of the local university.

I know the Right accuses us Lefties of always looking for an excuse to say the Surge has failed - but this really doesn't look good. And if it does all blow up again, I'm pretty sure we'll be hearing arguments from the Right about how it means US troops can't withdraw, even so soon after we've been hearing arguments about how the US can't withdraw now that "we're" winning. (Not that many of them have been anywhere near the shooting. Who's this "we", Kimo Sabi?)

Update: the WSJ reports that Bush and Maliki are about to agree on a timetable that agrees with Obama's timetable.

With violence seemingly certain to go up dramatically in Iraq if Maliki ostracizes the Awakening movemnt, and US troops committed to a substantial withdrawal regardless - all in time for the US election - is McCain's Iraq policy in tatters?