Bush's Meeting With A Murderer

A Good Article
(I suggest reading the entire article)
By Robert Dreyfuss

"President George W. Bush meets today with Abdel Aziz Hakim, the turbaned leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shiite fundamentalist party that is strongly tied to Iran. In so doing, the president is meeting with someone who, perhaps more than anyone else in Iraq, is responsible for trying to destroy Iraqi national unity, prevent national reconciliation among Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian mix, and push Iraq into civil war. Hakim, who was virtually Fed-Ex’d into Iraq by the Pentagon in March 2003, was a mainstay of the Iraqi National Congress, led by neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi throughout the 1990s. And today Hakim controls the SCIRI militia, the Badr Brigade, the Iraqi interior ministry and many of Iraq’s feared death squads. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hakim is a mass murderer.

What’s stunning about Bush’s encounter with Hakim is that it occurs precisely at the moment when critically important bridges are being built across Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite divide—bridges that Hakim is trying to blow up.

It is not the first time that Hakim has tried to undermine reconciliation efforts. During repeated attempts by the Arab League to organize a conference that would bring Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leaders together with representatives of the armed resistance in search of an accord, Hakim almost single-handedly destroyed the idea. And it is Hakim, whose SCIRI controls much of Iraq’s south, who is the driving force behind efforts to create a separatist Shiite-run state in Iraq’s south.

Hakim’s wrecking-ball effort is taking place in the context of unprecedented efforts by leaders of Iraq’s factions to create what many Iraqi leaders are calling a “government of national salvation.”

Even as the National Salvation Front takes shape, there is strong evidence that Sunni and Shiite clerics are reaching out to each other.

Two weeks ago, the Iraqi interior ministry, which is heavily controlled by Hakim’s SCIRI, issued an arrest warrant for al-Dhari, accusing him of maintaining ties to “terrorists.”

Still, it is perhaps Iraq’s last, best hope for ending its civil war and starting to recreate a functioning state. Against this, there is talk inside the Bush administration, of “picking a winner,” of choosing sides in Iraq’s civil war—which, of course, means backing the Shiites. Such a notion is a nonstarter, if for no other reason than the question: Which Shiites? For the Bush administration, it could only mean SCIRI, Hakim’s band of thugs and assassins.

It is too much, perhaps, to expect from the Bush administration, but here’s an idea. Instead of trying to court Hakim and SCIRI to support a continued U.S. occupation of Iraq, the White House ought to acknowledge and heed the growing body of opinion in Iraq that wants the United States out, fast."