At Kuwait meeting, U.S. hope for regional aid to Iraq

The summit of Arab neighbors Tuesday is the third attempt to gain more support for Iraq's reconstruction from Sunni states. Baghdad's crackdown on Shiite militias may help.

from the April 22, 2008 edition

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The US is also hoping some Sunni countries will announce that they are ready to open embassies in Baghdad – though the success of such initiatives has been patchy in the past. Egypt sent an ambassador to Baghdad soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein, but he was assassinated.

Iraq, for its part, is looking for promises of debt reduction from its neighbors.

Some are hopeful that Maliki's offensive against Shiite militias – a campaign begun in late March and continuing in Basra and in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood – will pay off among Iraq's Arab neighbors.

"The events of Basra have bought Maliki some street cred," says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "He can go to Kuwait and say, 'See, I'm not some Iranian toy,' whereas a year ago the Sunnis saw him strictly as an Iranian agent with Sunni blood on his hands."

In fact, part of the point of dispatching the two top US officials in Iraq – Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Commander of US forces Gen. David Petraeus – to Riyadh last week was to impress upon the Saudis the significance of Maliki's actions, both domestically and on Iraqi Shiite ties with Iran.

Still, some Iraqis say the squeamish Arab regimes have themselves to blame for Iran's unrivaled influence in Iraq. Iran has cemented economic ties with Iraq, especially in the south and in the oil sector, and is also involved in development in the Kurdish region.

"The Arabs complain that Iran is growing in its presence and importance, but the Arabs have their share of responsibility because they have left the Iraqi door open to Iran," says Hamid al-Tamimi Baghdad University's College of Political Science. "Iran has an ambassador and an embassy, Iran is making economic agreements, but they [the Sunni regimes] have not done these things. The Iranians are making friends here," he adds, "but all the while the Arabs are far away."

The Iranians are playing several games at the same time, analysts say. They want a stable Iraq, but they also want a weak Iraq that can never again threaten Iran as Saddam Hussein's Iraq did. They are arming the Shiite militias and groups fighting the Iraqi Army, but their aim may be more to build up the Shiites in the case of a return to civil war, analysts say, than to weaken the government.

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