It looks to me like Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki has decided that his bread is buttered in Baghdad, not Washington.<\/p>\n
More specifically, he has affirmed his allegiance to Moqtada al-Sadr, rather than US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.<\/p>\n
Now that his bread is buttered, we’ll find out if his days are numbered.<\/p>\n
Here is the latest news from the Guardian<\/a> on Maliki’s strident news conference:<\/p>\n The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, today denounced a US raid against a Shia militia position<\/strong> and denied that his government had agreed to a timetable to crack down<\/strong> on violence.<\/p>\n Mr al-Maliki said he had not been consulted about the operation to snatch a militia commander from inside Sadr City<\/strong> and insisted, “It will not be repeated”<\/strong>. He also hit out at an announcement yesterday by the most senior US general in Iraq, General George Casey, and the US ambassador Zalmay Khalizad<\/strong>, stating that the Iraqi government had agreed to a timetable to curb violence in the country.<\/p>\n “I affirm that this government represents the will of the people and no one has the right to impose a timetable on it<\/strong>,” he told a news conference…<\/p>\n The timeline plan outlined yesterday by Mr Khalilzad was believed to have grown out of recent Washington meetings at which the Bush administration sought to reshape its Iraq policy<\/strong> amid mounting US deaths and declining domestic support for the 44-month-old war.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The fact of the Raids on Sadr City surely reflects pressure from the US military brass<\/a> for a crackdown on Sadrist forces, if not Moqtada al-Sadr himself.<\/p>\n Maliki has denounced such raids before<\/a> and recently demanded that US forces release a leading Sadrist<\/a>.<\/p>\n In this instance, it appears that the US was looking for the “Keyser S\u00c3\u00b6ze” of Sadr City<\/a>, Abu Dera (aka, Abu Dereh). According to the New York Times<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n Iraqi forces and American advisers entered the far northern tip of the [Sadr City] district, the domain of an infamous Shiite guerilla leader known by his Iraqi nickname, Abu Dera, and immediately came under fire…<\/p>\n Residents said that Abu Dera, whose real name is Ismail al-Zerjawi<\/strong>, was not among those captured, though his son was wounded and his cousin killed. Once loyal to Mr. Sadr, Abu Dera broke away in 2004<\/strong> and now runs his own influential crime ring. He is famous among Shiites, who put his image on their cellphones and refer to him as the Zarqawi of the Shiites, a reference to the former Al Qaeda leader who exhorted Sunni Arabs to kill Shiites.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n [By the way: this is a far more detailed profile of Abu Dera than I’ve seen elsewhere. Type “Zerjawi” into Google News and so far the search engine returns only a question: “Did you mean Zarqawi<\/em>?”]<\/p>\n US pressure on Maliki to crack down on the Sadrists is essentially a demand that he abandon and betray a significant element of his own political base in exchange for continuing US “support.”<\/p>\n Maliki has refused that exchange. He now risks losing US support.<\/p>\n