Eli Lake covers US outreach to Iraqi political actors:
On Wednesday, Brett McGurk, the senior State Department official responsible for policy on Iraq, met in Baghdad at the home of Ahmed Chalabi, the former exile leader who was supported by neoconservatives inside the Bush administration before the Iraq war.
The meeting, first reported by The New York Times, was the first time McGurk had traveled to Chalabi’s Baghdad estate, according to Chalabi’s Washington adviser, Francis Brooke. “They discussed the current politics and Dr. Chalabi told him it would be very difficult for (Nouri al) Maliki to continue as prime minister,” Brooke told The Daily Beast.
Uh-oh. Then this:
Brooke would not say if Chalabi was eyeing the top job himself. But he did point out that the former exile leader—who is now a member of parliament and a senior member of the Shi’ite party affiliated with Iraq’s powerful Hakim family—supported the creation of a national reconciliation committee and the release of Sunni prisoners detained without charge. What’s more, Brooke added, Chalabi “is now open to reconsideration of the national de-Baathification law.”
That’s the law that purged members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party from Iraq’s government—the law that Chalabi helped write. Not surprising, the de-Baathification law is one piece of legislation that has infuriated Iraq’s Sunni minority, who say it has been used to isolate their leaders from important national positions.
But Beauchamp doubts booting Maliki would do much good:
[T]he core of the conflict is that Sunnis and Shias want the government to look dramatically different, and be run by different people. That is an astronomically difficult problem to solve on its own terms. The idea that the United States could pressure a solution to it — in the middle of a civil war — overestimates how much influence America has over Baghdad .
It’s not that Sunni-Shia divide is totally intractable. As [Marc] Lynch notes, there have been opportunities to make deals that would have significantly calmed sectarian tensions. Deals that Maliki rejected, of course. And perhaps the US could help broker negotiations at one point in the future.
But the idea that the US could solve the deeper problems fueling the insurgency by removing Maliki oversimplifies just how deep those problems go, and ignores the bigger and more difficult issues. Removing Maliki is a first step, but the broader causes of the chaos in Iraq run much deeper than his administration.
This all feels like some sick, recurring nightmare. Because, after all, trusting Chalabi the first time around worked out so well, didn’t it?
The Dish 