Premier’s Actions in Iraq Raise U.S. Concerns

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Jasim Nusaif, 71, in a photograph held by his son. He was among hundreds of former Baath Party members swept up in recent arrests. His family said the party expelled him in the 1980s.

By JACK HEALY, TIM ARANGO and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

Published: December 12, 2011

BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has moved swiftly to consolidate power in advance of the American military withdrawal, offering a glimpse of how Iraq’s post-American identity may take shape, by rounding up hundreds of former Baath Partymembers and evicting Western companies from the heavily fortified Green Zone.

As Mr. Maliki met with President Obama in Washington on Monday to discuss Iraq’s future after the end of a painful nearly nine-year war, his aggressive actions back home raised new concerns in the West, where officials have long been uneasy with the prime minister’s authoritarian tendencies.

The actions also underscored the many lingering questions about America’s uncertain ally, a prime minister who once found refuge in Syria and Iran and who will now help write the epitaph to the American invasion.

“There are two dominant narratives in Washington about Maliki,” said Ramzy Mardini, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington who recently published a report on the arrests. “Some say he is a nationalist; others say he is a puppet of Iran.”

Both are oversimplifications, he said: “Maliki is a Maliki-ist. His religion is the church of survivability.”

Mr. Maliki, whose bland public persona belies his mastery of Iraq’s zero-sum politics, will help decide if his nation preserves its fragile democracy or if it will return to one-man-one-party rule. As an exile from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq who escaped a death warrant, Mr. Maliki has proven his ability to retain power. But he is also criticized for holding tight to a security-first mentality. And as a Shiite leader who some say owes his current position to Iran’s backing, he has not made clear if Washington, or Tehran, will wield more influence.

A Western diplomat who has worked closely with Mr. Maliki said the prime minister’s mind-set still reflected the years after the American invasion when 3,000 Iraqi civilians were dying each month and sectarian war threatened to rip the country apart.

“He sees himself as fighting since 2006 to pull the country out of the brink,” the diplomat said.

But Mr. Maliki has also taken steps to put his stamp on the Green Zone, the physical center of government whose geography and very name became shorthand for the cloistered American presence. His son, Ahmed, has overseen raids evicting Western companies from the Green Zone in recent weeks. As the prime minister left for the United States, onerous new security procedures were put in place at the few entrances into the area.

That, and the scale and secrecy of the arrests in October and November, of 600 former Baathists, have raised new tensions in Iraq’s suspicious political atmosphere. They have fanned fears that Mr. Maliki will use the threat of terrorism and unrest as a pretext to strike political foes.

The Iraqi government said the arrests had been prompted by a tip from Libya’s transitional government that said documents revealed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was working with insurgents to stage a coup. Mr. Maliki has denied any sectarian or political motives behind the sweep, pointing out that both Shiites and Sunnis were arrested. In an interview with Iraq’s official television channel, he said the raids had captured loyalists to Saddam Hussein who were conspiring with Al Qaeda, not peaceful, low-level party apparatchiks.

“We do not have space in our government for those plotting against our government,” he said.

A person briefed on the raid by Iraqi security forces said some of the detainees were in fact military and intelligence officials from the old government. Other names on the target lists, however, included laborers, political adversaries of the government, the elderly — even dead people.

“It’s highly unlikely to be much validity behind” the coup plot, said a Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, to avoid upsetting relations with the Iraqi government. “Baathism here is a symbol that Maliki uses as a bogyman. It gives them the leeway to go around arresting people. It’s about a climate of fear.”

Mr. Maliki’s signal achievement since he first won office in 2006 has been consolidating control of the security forces, reducing violence through a willingness to crack down on Shiite militias from strongholds in the southern city of Basra. The defeat of the militias demonstrated to Iraqis, particularly the Sunnis, that Mr. Maliki would evenly target all insurgent groups, regardless of sect, and bolstered his credentials as a nationalist.

As Iraq’s commander in chief, he sometimes micromanages the forces under his control. He pays informers out of his own pocket for intelligence and sometimes sends orders to commanders in the field by text message, officials say.

But in a country where political leaders regularly fly off to second homes in Jordan or London, Mr. Maliki often works through the night in his Baghdad offices and has a steel-trap memory for dates, names and conversations. His family — wife, four daughters and a son — all live in Iraq, while many leading politicians have moved their families abroad.

If he eschews a cult of personality like that built by Mr. Hussein, his close control over Iraq’s police and army and his influence over the country’s judicial system have drawn calls that Mr. Maliki is becoming too powerful.

His government has come under criticism from rights groups for running secret jails, widespread abuses inside Iraq’s detention system, and for jailing political adversaries, such as journalists and demonstrators calling for government reforms.

In interviews, a handful of the people arrested in the recent Baathist sweeps spoke angrily about the justice system.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Abu Muamel Bahadli, 60, a retired teacher from Basra who was arrested. “They don’t have an idea about who is the real enemy. They also want to keep the people distracted from their corruption. I spent two weeks and then they released me without one question.”

Nearly nine years after the American invasion broke the Baath Party’s stranglehold on power, the specter of Baathism remains a ghost that Iraq cannot seem to exorcise. The Baath Party staged coups in 1963 and 1968 to seize power, and its persistent, if shadowy, presence in Sunni areas of the country offers a reminder that few Iraqi leaders leave office peacefully.

In late October, more than 100 professors at Tikrit University — in Mr. Hussein’s hometown — were fired for alleged Baathist connections.

“You can’t live in a democratic system in this way,” said former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a former Baathist himself who frequently clashes with the prime minister. “It is painful to see what is happening to this country.”

Despite strains of Sunni disenfranchisement, Sunni Arab politicians hold powerful posts in government, including speaker of Parliament, deputy prime minister and vice president. (A Kurd serves as president.)

And, as Mr. Maliki frequently points out in speeches, deadly vestiges of Mr. Hussein’s government do continue to stalk Iraq.

But when the Iraqi forces arrested former Baathists, they also hauled in suspects like Jasim Nusaif, a 71-year-old retired bureaucrat with high blood pressure and a tendency to faint on his morning walks to buy bread.

Mr. Nusaif’s wife and son said he was an employee in Iraq’s Water Ministry who was expelled from the Baath Party in the early 1980s for refusing to volunteer for the front lines in the grinding Iran-Iraq war. He retired from the government and worked for a while at a minibus depot.

Mostly, his family said, he now just collected his pension and read the newspapers at home in the heavily Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya, a jumble of faded colonial mansions where bombs still rip through crowds.

“He’s old and he’s sick. He just sits in the garden,” said his son, Mohammed Jasim. “I can’t believe how a 71-year-old man could carry out a military coup against the government.”