A quick note on the debate surrounding Adel Abd al-Mehdi's interview on al-Arabiya expressing his fears of a military coup, which I tagged last week. Sam Parker throws some cold water on the story here, reading it as general rhetoric rather than something more specific to worry about: "the host herself specifically raises the question of whether “Iraq should fear a military coup,” and he says yes, because Iraqi society is militarized and because Iraq has a long history of military coups, about which he goes into some detail".
On that point, I would just note that last fall, I talked to a senior Iraqi military officer (can't identify him, sorry, but it isn't important) who said many of the same things: he worried about the US drive to expand the Iraqi Army because Iraq was already so militarized a society and all of its other institutions so weak. I thought it was an interesting perspective for someone in his position and it always stayed with me. Abd al-Mehdi obviously isn't the only one to think about such things....
Still, the very existence of a debate about a possible military coup (whatever Abd al-Mehdi himself meant) does strike me as significant. Perhaps as a signal of a divide between ISCI and Maliki, as Parker speculates. Perhaps as a signal of the deep ongoing fears of another Baathist revival, and the plausibility of such a scenario in the minds of many in the Iraqi political class (linked, then, to the struggles over the future of the Awakenings and deBaathification reform and the political reconciliation portfolio more broadly). And perhaps, given the source, a not particularly subtle message being conveyed from an increasingly annoyed Washington to the "over-confident" Maliki about possible threats to his tenure in power. Of all the possible ways to put pressure on Maliki and to shape the incentives of the Iraqi ruling elite, veiled coup threats (along with near-simultaneous, unsurprising but inflammatory reports of U.S. spying on Maliki) strike me as the least likely to succeed and the most likely to generate a backlash, but that's just me...
UPDATE: a sharp friend of mine emails to point out that many of Maliki's organizational efforts in the security apparatus over the last year have been specifically designed to "coup-proof" his regime. That's standard operating procedure for authoritarian Arab regimes, which - as Steve Heydemann most incisively pointed out - have been impressively "upgrading" their control, co-optation, repression and surveillance mechanisms of authoritarianism over the last few years in the face of all the American talk of democratization. All of which would tend to support Greg Gause's "strong man bid" argument, despite my reservations...
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