From Iraq (NY Times):
BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq threatened on Wednesday to abandon an American-backed power-sharing government created a year ago, throwing the country’s fragile democracy into further turmoil just days after the departure of American troops and potentially tarnishing what has been cast as a major foreign policy achievement for President Obama.
In a nearly 90-minute news conference broadcast on tape-delay, Mr. Maliki defied his rivals and pushed back on all fronts in Iraq’s deepening political crisis, threatening to release investigatory files that he claimed implicated his opponents in terrorism.
He also threatened the Kurds, a valuable ally with close ties to the Americans, warning that there would be “problems” if they protected Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who fled to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in recent days to escape an arrest warrant on charges that he ran a death squad responsible for assassinations and bombings.
Why should Maliki continue with the “American-backed power-sharing government”? Effectively, Obama has taken the troops out ahead of time and are now leaving the Iraqi field wide open for other-than-American influence – read that as Iran. Obama can now be said to have created a political vacuum in the region (or to be kind, a partial at the least; you and I would not last long breathing it). Sure, with 16,000 personnel stationed at our embassy there we’ll have a presence there but a civilian in a region that loves the strong horse and derides the weak one. Obama has shut the door on the American influence by signaling weakness in an area that will exploit such a sign.
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