In the early months of 2011, as popular uprisings raised hopes for
democracy around the Middle East, Iraqis were inspired to make their own
call for a more democratic government and for a time, it seemed
possible that they might induce significant reforms. On February 25,
2011, when thousands of young Iraqis took to the streets in Baghdad’s
Tahrir Square and more than a dozen other cities, several local
officials, including the governors of two Shiite provinces, were forced
to resign. A few days later, Maliki, unnerved by the toppling of
dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, announced a hundred-day deadline for the
government to weed out corruption and improve the delivery of services.
Maliki’s Sunni and Shiite critics seized upon the protests. Rather than
come together to fix Iraq’s myriad problems, however, each political
party saw the demonstrations as a way to pressure its rivals. It was a
pattern that would repeat again and again over the next four years as
politicians bullied and embarrassed one another at the country’s
expense.
That summer, the prime minister responded with authoritarian tactics.
During the second Friday protest in Baghdad that June, Maliki
supporters and plainclothes security agents descended upon the
protesters and attacked them with clubs and knives. These roving bands
of pro-Maliki men, who identified themselves as victims of terrorism,
waved pictures of Allawi with a giant red X slashed across his face,
while shouting “death to Baathists.” Iraqi soldiers stood by and
officials from Maliki’s office toured the square in praise of their
armed supporters, ignoring the violence.
Maliki understood that the Americans were getting ready to leave and
that the American-sponsored rules that had been imposed after 2003 were
temporary. Vice President Biden, who traveled to Iraq four times between
January 2010 and January 2011 to promote a successful democratic
transition, had stopped coming as the American military prepared for its
final withdrawal. And during the June crackdown, the US embassy—which
is right across the river from Baghdad’s Tahrir Square—remained silent.
By the fall, Maliki’s office was insinuating that his own Sunni-vice
president, Tareq Hashimi, was running death squads, and stories were
circulating that Hashimi and his fellow Sunni politicians, including
finance minister Rafaa Issawi and Parliament speaker Usama Nujafi, were
conspiring with Turkey and the Gulf states to bring down the new
Shiite-led order. Upon his return from a triumphant visit to the White
House that December to mark the formal US withdrawal, Maliki sent
security forces to arrest Hashimi, who fled to Turkey, and to surround
the homes of prominent Sunni officials inside the Green Zone.
-- Ned Parker, "Iraq: The Road to Chaos" (The New York Review of Books).