Word: iraq
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...described by President Bush as "my man"; the next, he was fulminating against U.S. interference in Iraqi politics. "It's like every six months there's a new Maliki," says a Western official in Baghdad. "And as a political strategy, it's genius: in a country as divided as Iraq, it's the only way to appeal to all people...
...project a persona instantly familiar to Iraqis, and to Arabs in general: the strongman. He has ordered the arrest of a number of prominent Sunnis, pushed aside rivals and undermined allies. In speeches, his language has grown increasingly belligerent, accusing those who disagree with his policies of working against Iraq. (See pictures of life returning to Iraq's streets...
...didn't know he had it in him," says Ridha Jawad Taki, a Shi'ite parliamentarian who has known Maliki since the 1980s, when both lived in Syria. "He has become self-assured, and very decisive." Those qualities were burnished in November, when Maliki overcame considerable opposition within Iraq's parliament to sign an agreement with the U.S. that requires the withdrawal of American combat troops from most urban areas this summer, and from Iraq altogether by 2011. Some factions wanted a faster withdrawal, others insisted on a delay. (Maliki rarely meets Western journalists; his office didn't respond...
...risky strategy. Some Iraqis say a strongman is just what they need to end Iraq's destructive sectarian politics. But at the polls, Iraqis have shown little appetite for tough guys, preferring to vote for diffuse coalitions of parties with little in common beyond sectarian identity. The cautionary tale for Maliki is Iyad Allawi, the country's first post-Saddam Prime Minister: he, too, portrayed himself as a strongman, but his secular coalition won barely 14% of the vote. "Maliki will go the same way as Allawi," says Abdel-Bari al-Zebari, a Kurdish MP. "Iraqis know that a strongman...
...Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Two years ago she expressed concerns about Maliki's sectarian sensibilities and called on the Iraqi parliament to replace him with a "less divisive and more unifying figure." Furious, Maliki said that Democrats such as Clinton were treating Iraq as "their property," and told them to lay off. But now that Clinton is Secretary of State, it would be just like Maliki to forget old animosities and present a friendly new face...