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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been making the rounds in the Middle East, calling for a “national unity government” that includes Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. Somehow the Americans appear to think that this will allow for a solution to the crisis in Iraq.
Unfortunately, diplomatic memory appears exceedingly short. Was it not a “national unity government” that was formed after the 2010 Iraqi elections? Did Iraq not have a Shiite Prime Minister, a Kurdish President and a Sunni Finance Minister? In addition, were not the Foreign Minister and one of the Deputy Prime Ministers Kurdish, while one of the Vice-Presidents and another of the Deputy Prime-Ministers were Sunni Arab? Did other ministers not come from various independent, Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and even Turkmen and secular parties?
It was while heading this government that Prime Minister Maliki put out arrest warrants for the Sunni Vice-President and the Sunni Finance Minister, and threatened to “sack” the Sunni Vice-Prime Minister. It was under Maliki that the promised new position of “Head of Council of Strategic Policy” for Sunni leader Iyad Allawi never materialized. The Kurds, meanwhile, saw their officers purged one after another from the security forces, while their ministers in Baghdad appeared powerless to contradict Mr. Maliki on any matters of substance. Last November, the Kurdistan Region even saw Mr. Maliki and his cohorts decide to withhold the Kurdish share of Iraq’s budget.
So now everyone is supposed to take Mr. Kerry’s advice and forget all that in order to form a new, improved “national unity government,” and the Americans refuse to say publically whether or not they think Maliki staying on as Prime Minister would be a good idea. After the Sunnis and Kurds again submit to Baghdad’s authority, so the logic goes, everyone can talk about more specific forms of power sharing and decentralization. The power sharing and decentralization measures would supposedly include things the Americans steadfastly refused to support in the past, such as the creation of a Sunni region, regional security forces not beholden to Baghdad, and independent finances (mainly from new oil and gas fields) for the regions and governorates. In this scenario, Sunni tribes and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) are presumably expected to show a little trust in such promises and take on the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) on Mr. Maliki’s, or his lookalike successor’s, behalf.
Both Kurds and Sunni Arabs have heard this song before, of course, when they were willing to give it a try. Everyone was fooled once, and the shame for that rests with Mr. Maliki. Should they be fooled a second time, the shame would be their own. As a high-level KRG official told me a few years back (the day two plane loads of weapons from Bulgaria were discovered at a KRG airport, to the surprise of the U.S. and Baghdad), “the Americans seem to have this strange faith in promises written on pieces of paper;” he then added, “We’re not in Switzerland – this is the Middle East.”
In any case, Mr. Maliki appears unwilling to even play this game again. In a televised address this week, the Prime Minister said "The call to form a national emergency government is a coup against the constitution and the political process...It is an attempt by those who are against the constitution to eliminate the young democratic process and steal the votes of the voters." Amongst the Shiite electorate, Mr. Maliki did well in the March 2014 elections, so he is probably reasoning that he can form a Shiite government and use military means (with a lot of Iranian assistance) to reassert control over the country. At the rate that his soldiers have been fleeing the battlefield, this of course seems more than a little optimistic on his part.
The Kurds, meanwhile, politely host American visitors in Erbil and listen to their proposals, but refuse to continue dancing to Washington or Baghdad’s tune. The song is just too old and too worn out. Besides, they reason, the more stubborn Maliki remains, the more Baghdad and the Sunnis will tire each other out while Kurdistan moves towards its dream of independence.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of the forthcoming Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).
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