On the ground in Baghdad is a sprawling intelligence operation called the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, or INIS. Only INIS isn't really "National" at all. To the great chagrin of the Maliki government, it's financed and controlled by the CIA. And its boss is a longtime Allawi friend and CIA asset, Muhammed Shahwani.
Who's Muhammed Shahwani? He's a former Iraqi military officer who, along with Allawi, helped plot a botched coup against Saddam Hussein in 1996. Despite the failure, the CIA considered him a valuable asset, largely on the strength of his considerable knowledge of Saddam's military apparatus.
Allawi seems to be caught up in a veritable network of information brokers, power consolidators, and various distributors of thick envelopes. And these people all have vested interests in keeping us on board, keeping the money coming in, and maybe friends get to dip their beak in a little. It's almost charmingly Old World in its practically guileless lack of sophistication, like having a Nigerian prince send you a creatively spelled e-mail urgently beseeching help from li'l ol' you.
INIS's estrangement from the Shiite-led government deepened under Nouri al-Maliki's administration. Maliki's attempts to control INIS led Shahwani to tell the CIA that Maliki was way too close to the Iranians, which lead [sic] the agency to increase its investment in its longtime ally. Ned Parker of The Los Angeles Times quoted an anonymous U.S. military official who said "U.S. funding for the INIS amounts to $3 billion over a three-year period that started in 2004." With money independent from Baghdad, Maliki has no power to remove Shahwani, so he did the next best thing: he started an alternative, primarily Shiite intelligence service, run by a functionary named Sherwan al-Waili. As a result, Iraq now has two competing intelligence services, with INIS intimating that al-Waili's outfit is a hive of Iranian infiltration.
It's unknown how large the INIS is, or what its capabilities truly are. But INIS provides Shahwani with an enviable platform, and he apparently remains dominant over Waili in the fractious Iraqi national-security apparatus. Just this week, he was part of an official delegation that visited Amman to discuss deepening Iraqi-Jordanian counterterrorism ties.
This does not sound like a unity coalition parliamentary whatsit trying to pull its shit together. This sounds like the Five Families mustering forces and consolidating alliances and power, in preparation for what's to come.
Other than that, it's exactly like Vietnam. Ask Junior; he'll tell ya.
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