Iraq: With Friends Like These ...

It may have been the last time George W. Bush felt really good about Iraq. Last June, as the president flew back from a surprise visit to Baghdad--and his first sitdown with the new Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki--he was visibly excited. Bush was savoring a rare moment in his presidency: an unbroken string of great news out of Iraq. The U.S. Air Force had just knocked off Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi at his hideout north of Baghdad. The tough, plain-spoken Maliki had replaced Ibrahim Jaafari, Iraq's disastrously wishy-washy interim prime minister. And Bush had brazenly ordered Air Force One into a war zone in broad daylight so that he could shake hands with Iraq's first democratically elected leader under the new Constitution. The president wasn't disappointed. "I wanted to hear whether or not he was stuck in the past or willing to think about the future," a relaxed Bush later told reporters onboard Air Force One. "And I came away with a very positive impression." Maliki, Bush said back then, "is a no-nonsense guy that talks about priorities and how he's going to achieve the priorities. And that's comforting."

The White House doesn't seem to be taking much comfort in Maliki now. Late last week Bush gathered a group of his dwindling Republican supporters in the third-floor solarium at the White House to discuss his latest plan to salvage the war in Iraq--the deployment of 21,000 more U.S. troops to pacify Baghdad and Anbar province. According to one participant, conservative Sen. Craig Thomas of Wyoming, many of the GOP senators expressed doubts that America could depend on Maliki. They cited the Shiite leader's failure to quell the sectarian violence that contributed to the deaths of more than 34,000 Iraqis in 2006, according to the United Nations, as well as nearly 600 U.S. soldiers since he took over in May. "The president expressed doubts, too," says Thomas. With Vice President Dick Cheney sitting silently beside him, Bush "also indicated he was going to make pretty clear what he expects from the prime minister." Echoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who recently told Congress that Maliki was living on "borrowed time," Bush added ominously that "if [Maliki's effort] doesn't work very well there's a good chance those people over there will replace him," says Thomas.

Rarely have so many American hopes depended on a single foreign leader--and one of dubious loyalties at that. The president will walk into the well of the House for his seventh State of the Union speech this week, knowing that his fate is inextricably tied to Maliki's. While Bush will get the customary ovation, he knows the war has emboldened Democrats and silenced Republicans in Congress. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the president's approval rating matched his record low of 31 percent. Seventy percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of Iraq, and more than half trust the Democrats in Congress to make better decisions about the war. Two thirds oppose his plan to inject more troops into the fight. Among Republicans, however, there is still broad support for both the war and the president, which creates a dilemma for nervous GOP candidates looking to the next election.

Not surprisingly, the president has retooled his State of the Union address to focus on Iraq. And the key audience will not be Democrats, who are planning to vote on a nonbinding Senate resolution opposing Bush's "surge" plan next week. Instead it will be Republicans, at least a dozen of whom are expected to join Sen. Chuck Hagel voting in favor.

Much of their skepticism can be traced back to mistrust of Maliki, who admittedly has not given them much reason for confidence. The Iraqi prime minister was put into power with the support of Shiite radical Moqtada al-Sadr's political bloc, and has stymied previous U.S. attempts to target Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. During the most recent U.S. attempt to stabilize Baghdad, just last fall, he could not or would not provide enough Iraqi troops to make the plan work. His handling of Saddam Hussein's execution, an unsavory affair marred by Shiite taunts of the former dictator, again raised questions of whether he was biased against Sunnis. "So much of our future in that place is in the hands of Maliki," says one Republican doubter, Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, who doesn't think the Iraqi prime minister is up to the challenge. He also worries that Maliki wants to turn Iraq into "a Shiite theocracy like they have in Iran."

True, like many Shiite opponents of Saddam, Maliki spent almost a decade in exile--in Syria and Iran--in the 1980s. During that time he developed ties to the Sadr family, and his Dawa Party is seen by many Iraqi Sunnis as part of Tehran's sphere of influence. Yet unlike Sadr or other Iraqi politicians like Abdelaziz al-Hakim, leader of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), he is not a cleric himself. He also has a reputation as a pragmatist, earned while helping to negotiate Iraq's Constitution in 2005. Asked about Sadr last week, Maliki said that if the cleric works with the Baghdad government, then "he is my friend and he is my ally. If he does the opposite, he would be someone who is rebellious, someone who is acting against the law. To assure you ... in the last four years, I only talked to [Sadr] twice."