Can Iraq's Maliki deliver?

By Roger Hardy
BBC Middle East analyst

The US has already warned the Nouri Maliki is "on borrowed time"

President Bush's new strategy for Iraq depends on people over whom he has little or no control - chief among them Iraq's beleaguered Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki.

Can a weak prime minister, who says he hates the job and never sought it, perform the tasks required of him?

The Americans can persuade and cajole, but need to maintain the polite fiction that Iraq has a sovereign government, rather than one which takes orders from Washington.

In keeping with this necessary fiction, the US administration maintains it is the Baghdad government, rather than the White House, which wants an extra 20,000 US troops to go to Iraq.

Reluctant acceptance

The signs are, on the contrary, that Iraqi leaders have accepted a plan they never really wanted.

As recently as November, when Mr Maliki and Mr Bush met in Jordan, the Iraqis were saying that they had a new security plan for Baghdad and did not need more US troops in the capital.

To believe that Iraq's leaders will re-invent themselves, and play their part successfully in the new Bush strategy, requires a substantial leap of faith

But after a certain amount of friction between the two sides, they have now, in public at least, come together to support the new strategy.

Will it work?

As ever in Iraq, success will depend more on political decisions than military ones. And that is where Mr Maliki comes in.

The whole point of trying to pacify Baghdad's most violent neighbourhoods is to buy time for the Maliki government to become what it claims to be, a government of reconciliation and national unity.

That means reaching out to the minority Sunni Arabs, many of whom reject a government they allege does not represent them and which shelters Shia death squads.

The steps the Americans are calling on Mr Maliki to take are not new, but are vital if the new strategy is to achieve even partial success. He is being asked to:

• Crack down even-handedly on Shia as well as Sunni militants
• Allow former Baathists to regain their jobs
• Finding a formula for dividing oil revenues between the different regions,
• Bring in an amnesty for certain categories of Sunni insurgents
• Revise the constitution to meet Sunni concerns.

The difference this time is that there will be "benchmarks" and, according to President Bush, Mr Maliki will have to stick to them.

Divided loyalties

The Iraqi prime minister has been saying the right things, but many experts doubt whether he is strong enough to buck the sectarian trend.

The new Iraqi security forces are, all too often, loyal to sectarian militias rather than to the government.

Iraqi politicians tend to defend the interests of their communities rather than the common good.

Mr Maliki is so politically dependent on the radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr that he may, in the end, be unable to crack down on the powerful Sadrist militia, the Mehdi Army.

The Americans have made mistakes in Iraq. Even President Bush has, belatedly, acknowledged as much.

But Iraq's new leaders have too.

To believe that they will re-invent themselves, and play their part successfully in the new Bush strategy, requires a substantial leap of faith.