President Obama has a choice to make when he meets Iraq’s leader Tuesday: Give more American arms to strengthen the Iraqi army against the Islamic State or hand the opportunity off to Iran to extend its regional power.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is making his first visit to Washington as leader of the troubled state, and he is bringing a military wish list. He plans to ask Obama for billions of dollars in drones and other U.S. arms and to defer payments for the purchases.
A plunge in oil prices has devastated Baghdad’s finances as it is struggling to prevent the Sunni Islamic State from taking more territory, and the Iraqi leader is looking for the U.S. to fulfill its commitment to defeating the Islamic State.
Abadi, who succeeded Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister in September, has a tight line to walk when it comes to Iranian influence in his country. Shiite militias, backed by Tehran, have joined forces with the Iraqi army to try to beat back the Islamic State from key regions.
But those militias failed a key test in Tikrit in recent weeks when they were unable to expel Islamic State fighters on their own. The counteroffensive against the self-proclaimed caliphate stalled until the Iraqis called in U.S. air power — a commitment that is on shaky legal ground in the absence of a congressional authorization for use of force against the Islamic State.
“It is undeniable that Iranian influence is waxing in Iraq — it’s simply a fact,” said Douglas Ollivant, a senior national security studies fellow at the New American Foundation who has served as a director at the National Security Council under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush.
“Abadi has to convince Americans and the American political system that now is the time for Americans to double down on their friends in Iraq to try to counter Iranian influence, and that [he] is one of those Western-looking friends that we should support.”
The rise of the Islamic State has ushered in a sea change in U.S. public opinion about intervention in Iraq.
After opposing more military intervention in the Middle East for years after the 2003 Iraqi invasion, Americans are now overwhelmingly supportive of the airstrike campaign, and a narrow majority — 53 percent — now favor sending grounds troops to Syria and Iraq, according to a recent Gallup poll.
At the same time, American officials are encouraged by the initial accomplishments of the new prime minister.
In many ways, Abadi is experiencing the same open-armed U.S. embrace Afghanistan President Ghani received last month, for similar reasons. Both men offer a more pro-U.S. approach than their predecessors, Maliki and Hamid Karzai, respectively.
“We’re going to have a visit this week of ‘not Maliki’ just like we had a visit last month from ‘not Karzai,'” Ollivant said. “They are getting a certain benefit from not being the predecessor we’ve grown tired of.”
Iraqi experts across the political spectrum point to more concrete reasons for U.S. support for Abadi.
Few prime ministers have been dealt a worse hand in the first few months of assuming office. But possibly because the Islamic State threat is so serious, Abadi, a Shiite, has risen to the occasion, working with both Sunnis and Kurds and accomplishing what long eluded Maliki: striking an oil deal between Irbil and Baghdad late last year.
Iraq expelled the Islamic State from Tikrit and is now moving on to battle the group in Anbar province. Experts are also optimistic government forces will eventually succeed in forcing the Islamic State out of the country, although they say it could take more than two years to accomplish.
“I think there are hopeful signs, as ugly as Iraq has been,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The Islamic State, which controls an area of Iraq and Syria roughly the size of West Virginia, still poses an existential threat to Iraq, and warring factions threaten to tear apart the country. Abadi is ready to accept help where he can get it.
Abadi, like Maliki, a Dawa Party politician, prefers U.S. assistance with its more reliable weaponry and aircraft. But some of his senior officials have pointedly hinted that he would turn to Tehran or Moscow — both of which provide strong support to Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite rump state in Syria — if Washington refuses to provide the aid he’s seeking.
“The PM is committed to the U.S. … What he also wants to make sure is that he has a partner he can rely on,” an Iraqi official told Reuters late last week.
“If this opportunity gets passed up, the next stops on their path are Tehran and Moscow,” Ollivant predicted.
The Iraqis sought U.S. military support to fight the Islamic State’s bloody incursion in June of last year. But it took until August for Obama to authorize U.S. air strikes. The president has since deployed 3,000 American military forces to Iraq, but his request for congressional authorization is languishing.
It was a 180-degree shift for a president elected on promises to get America out of two wars in the Middle East, and Obama has limited the U.S. military role on the ground to training and advising Iraqi and Kurdish forces.
When asked about Abadi’s new request for aid Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest responded cautiously.
“We’re obviously deeply engaged in regular, even daily conversations about steps that the United States and the international community can take to support the Iraqi people, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces as they face down the ISIL threat,” he said.
“If there are specific ideas that Prime Minister Abadi has for stepped-up assistance, then we’ll obviously consider them very seriously,” he added.
Iraq experts say the Obama administration is right to be wary of providing military equipment and more arms without major conditions.
According to Human Rights Watch, regional militias operating inside Iraq, as well as Kurdish paramilitaries, have in recent weeks and months committed serious abuses against civilians in areas retaken from the Islamist State.
“ISIS poses a terrible threat to civilians in Iraq, but that’s no reason to pretend that paying lip service to human rights is an adequate response to the militia abuses,” Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said Monday. “President Obama needs to tell Prime Minister Abadi that militia revenge attacks won’t be tolerated.”
U.S. officials are worried about these militia abuses and their implications for Iraq’s long-term security and unity.
Obama needs to make clear to Abadi, the experts argue, that any U.S. aid to Iraqi security forces hinges on the Baghdad government’s taking steps to improve the protection of civilians in areas where these militias are active.
One of the main challenges for Obama in considering new aid for Iraq, Katulis argues, is “making sure the tools of outsiders don’t encourage the fragmentation of the state itself.”
