Ambassador Hill himself played key roles with respect to the two final straws in the saga about sectarian repolarisation in Iraq. The first had to do with de-Baathification, which the other Shiites had originally devised as an anti-Maliki weapon designed to force him into a more sectarian corner. When Hill and other players in the international community failed to come out strongly against the ad hoc de-Baathification process during the run-up to the March 2010 parliamentary elections, Maliki, too, ended up as a de-Baathification agitator. Second, during the contentious debate about the premiership for the next government during the summer of 2010, Hill insisted both on Maliki as premier as well as an inclusive government in which the Kurds would also participate. Given the constitutional framework in Iraq, that pretty much dictated the inclusion of the Sadrists and the formation of a broad sectarian Shiite front, since Maliki could not have won the premiership in any other way except one. And the only alternative that could have produced a Maliki premiership without the Sadrists – a smaller coalition of Maliki’s State of Law and the secular Iraqiyya - never gained any significant traction in US circles during Hill’s tenure.
Realistically speaking, could the new US ambassador to Iraq, James Jeffrey, have reversed any of Hill’s mistakes when he arrived in Baghdad in the autumn of 2010? Probably not. The idea of Maliki as the next premier was already deeply rooted in US policy-making circles, as was the convoluted and stillborn idea of placating his secular rival Ayad Allawi with the presidency of an unconstitutional strategic policy council. In early summer 2011, Jeffrey did have the chance to come out loud against all that nonsense when the implementation of the so-called Arbil framework that had delivered the second Maliki government in November 2010 seemed in doubt. He could for example instead have embraced the idea of a more compact government of State of Law, Iraqiyya and the Kurds that would have been more likely to seek an extension of the SOFA with the Americans. At that time, however, the sectarian polarisation set in motion again during Hill’s tenure was already beginning to make its mark in a serious way, and even if Jeffrey had considered this idea, it would have been an uphill struggle.
Chances are Jeffrey didn’t even consider it. The main problem in US policy-making for Iraq has been how they conceptualise the country and its people. Instead of thinking of the country as a union of Arabs and Kurds, as was usual among Iraqi oppositionists in the 1990s, Americans have tended to reify a tripartite paradigm in which Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds are seen as monolithic and enduring players. That is a paradigm that leaves pretty scant space for secularism and creates precisely the ethno-sectarian framework for Iraqi politics that Iran prefers.
It should be pretty obvious why Hill scoffs at the notion of the Americans having “clumsily re-energised” sectarian tension and why he so strenuously is seeking to pre-empt any discussion of the dangerously heretic question about “who lost Iraq”.
He did.
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