Between the hammer and the anvil, US presence in Iraq and Ma

[Stillw8n]

Between the hammer and the anvil, US presence in Iraq and Maliki’s future will be decided today
Posted on October 4, 2011 by Sappho
Between the US ham­mer and the Iran­ian anvil, not only the US pres­ence in Iraq, but Maliki’s future will be decided today. Iraqi Pres­i­dent Talabani’s call for a meet­ing among the lead­ers of the polit­i­cal coali­tions is the meet­ing which will decide the US pres­ence in Iraq.

On the loos­ing side, and unmo­ti­vated to attend the meet­ing, leader of Al-Iraqiya List Allawi knows that it is dif­fi­cult for The Iraqi pres­i­dent and the PM to give him the required guar­an­tees that he insists upon. Both Tal­a­bani and Maliki have their own objec­tives from this meeting.

Accord­ing to the lat­est devel­op­ments in the Iraqi scene there are two pri­or­i­ties, one con­cerns Maliki as prime min­is­ter, and the sec­ond con­cerns Tal­a­bani as part of the Kur­dis­tan Alliance.

Tal­a­bani already said:

To dis­cuss the Amer­i­can troops’ with­drawal as there is una­nim­ity on the with­drawal. And the topic of train­ers will be dis­cussed in the said meet­ing and God will­ing we hope to a reach a unan­i­mous deci­sion in the next meeting.

As for Maliki, is the ques­tion of the pres­ence of U.S. train­ers after the with­drawal of Amer­i­can troops late this year.

Maliki exposed to three types of pres­sures, one pres­sure of the polit­i­cal blocs who want to throw the ball in his court to indi­cate whether Iraq needs US train­ers or not, and can be given immu­nity or not.

[a del­e­ga­tion from the National Alliance met with the polit­i­cal body of the Sadrist Move­ment in order to con­vince the Sadrists to agree on the US train­ers pres­ence with­out immu­nity.]

The sec­ond of these pres­sures is the US, where Maliki does not want to look rebel­lious before the Amer­i­cans, and there­fore through this meet­ing he is try­ing to get rid of the US ham­mer, as much as pos­si­ble by assur­ing the approval of the blocks includ­ing the Al-Iraqiya on the pres­ence of the US trainers.

[The Amer­i­cans started to threat Maliki’s gov­ern­ment, a US con­gress del­e­ga­tion met with the Iraqi Harith Al-Dhari oppo­si­tion group in Amman-Jordan two days ago.]

In the same con­text, Maliki knows that sur­viv­ing the US ham­mer will not save him from falling into the Iran­ian anvil, seek­ing to cre­ate a del­i­cate bal­ance between the US sat­is­fac­tion with­out anger­ing the Iranians.

As for Tal­a­bani, since his return from Wash­ing­ton he started to focus on the US pres­sure expressed by the Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden on the level of the US train­ers and how to pro­vide a suit­able ground for the suc­cess of talks between the Kur­dish polit­i­cal del­e­ga­tion in Baghdad.

If both Maliki and Tal­a­bani reached full con­sen­sus today, the polit­i­cal land­scape will turn upside down to re-represented in the strate­gic alliance between the Shi­ite and Kur­dish coalitions.

But if there is no sig­nif­i­cant progress, the Kurds will play with Maliki using Allawi again, threat­en­ing him to with­draw con­fi­dence which will force Maliki to cre­ate a very dif­fi­cult balance.


http://www.roadstoiraq.com/2011/10/04/b ... ded-today/