Trump Threatens Baghdad as It Picks a Candidate To Lead Iraq

As President Trump amasses firepower around Iran, he is sending an unambiguous message to politicians in neighboring Iraq: You can ally with America or the Islamic Republic. You can’t have both — and the wrong choice could be hazardous. That is the upshot of Mr. Trump’s posting Tuesday on TruthSocial. It threatens to end America’s support of Baghdad if former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki returns to office. The message shook up Baghdad. It reverberated around the Middle East. It drew a rebuke from Tehran and its allied Iraqi militias. The president’s warning came as a strike group headed by the arrival near Iranian shores of an American aircraft carrier, United States Ship Lincoln, and as the mullahs ratcheted up threats of retaliation against America and Israel. Tehran-affiliated Shia militias in Iraq are well positioned to attack American bases in the region. With recently-delivered Iranian arms, they can also hit Israel.Americans might recall that Mr. Maliki stood next to President Bush at Baghdad in 2008 when an Iraqi tossed a shoe at the visiting American head of state. The veteran politician is considered closer to the Islamic Republic than colleagues like the current caretaker prime minister, Mohammed al-Sudani, who withdrew from the current race. ”I’m hearing that the great country of Iraq might make a very bad choice by reinstalling Nouri al Maliki as prime minister,” Mr. Trump wrote Tuesday. “Last time Maliki was in power, the country descended into poverty and total chaos.” If he is re-elected, “America will no longer help Iraq. If we are not there to help, Iraq has zero chance of success, prosperity, or freedom. Make Iraq great again.” Mr. Trump’s intervention came as Mr. Maliki, a former two-term premier, was all but assured of retaking office. According to the Iraqi constitution, the premiership is reserved for a Shiite. A coalition of leading Shiite parties approved Mr. Maliki’s candidacy. “Maliki was already measuring the suit he would wear on his return to office — and then came the Trump posting,” an Iraq watcher at the Moshe Dayan center in Tel Aviv University, Ronen Zeidel, tells the Sun. “This isn’t the first time. President Obama pushed Maliki out in 2014, when ISIS rose in Iraq.” Baghdad politicians have played the dual loyalty game for decades, including in the energy industry. Chevron Oil started working in Iraq last year. It took over from Russian and Chinese companies. As Mr. Zeidel notes, oil-rich Iraq produces crude but refrains from turning oil into gas. Instead it imports gas, which it could produce at home, from Iran. Such arrangements serve both Baghdad and Tehran. For leaders like Mr. Maliki, America’s presence in the country seems less reliable than neighboring Iran. “During my service in Iraq, I witnessed senior Iraqi officials openly claiming to stand with Washington while simultaneously sending loyalty messages to Iran’s Supreme Leader,” a former Baghdad political aide, Ali al-Mamouri, writes. “These were not isolated incidents or rogue behavior; they were features of a political culture built on hedging, duplication, and strategic ambiguity.”That game might be over now, Mr. Mamouri, a once senior adviser to the independent Iraq politician Mustafa al-Kadhimi, adds. “From Washington’s perspective,” he writes, “Iraq is no longer a state that can balance comfortably between Iran and the United States. The era of strategic ambiguity, of hedging, dual messaging, and calibrated neutrality, has ended. Alignment is now viewed as binary.”Washington is hoping to cultivate a new generation of Iraqi leaders who would end the double game and cut ties with Tehran. That search will only intensify of Shiite militias that are allied with the Islamic Republic would strike at American targets, which they refrained from doing in the last two years. The Shiite militia structure under the Popular Mobilization Force is officially answerable to the Iraqi president, but in reality it is an Iranian satrap. While in the past they took second place to other proxies, the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza are making these Iraqi militias valuable for Tehran, if it seeks revenge for a possible attack order by Mr. Trump.These militias are closer to American bases in the Gulf, Turkey, and Iraq itself than another well-armed Iranian proxy, the Houthis of Yemen. They increasingly are also watched closely in Israel. “This time the Iraqis might play a more significant role in a possible war than they did in the last two years,” Mr. Zeidel says.

Trump Threatens Baghdad as It Picks a Candidate To Lead Iraq

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