IRAQ: America’s declining influence in Baghdad

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Today’s Los Angeles Times reports on how America’s influence in Iraq is waning.

There are numerous examples of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki asserting his independence on key issues with the United States. Arguably the most important is a U.S.-Iraq security agreement that the two sides are negotiating. If Iraq gets its way, by next summer, U.S. forces will be restricted to bases outside cities unless Iraq chooses to ask them to remain in population centers.

The U.S. military also has accepted an Iraqi government push to take control of the U.S.-funded Sunni paramilitary fighters, who are credited with decimating Al Qaeda in Iraq and helping to reduce the country’s violence dramatically. Despite assurances from U.S. and Iraqi officials, the Sunni fighters are worried that the Iraq government plans to prosecute some of their leaders on criminal charges and would fail to provide them viable jobs in return for dissolving their program.

Already, some Sunni paramilitary leaders, credited by U.S. commanders with fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, have fled the country or gone into hiding. In Baqubah, the fighters have lost offices and checkpoints, while in western Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib district, the program has been almost completely dismantled.

The shift in the U.S. approach extends to the People’s Mujahedin, a group of Iranian exiles once funded by Saddam Hussein, whose camp in eastern Diyala province has been under U.S. protection since 2003. Shiite officials have long lobbied to close it, and Americans have now agreed to start the process of handing it over to the Iraqi army. The presence of the Iranian opposition group in Iraq has been an aggravation for neighboring Iran.

— Ned Parker In Baghdad

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