In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Monday, Maliki said he was fully prepared for a military confrontation with Iranian-armed Shiite militias, just as he had one in 2008 when he judged the militias were becoming too powerful and too much of an impediment for him.
Maliki said that if Iran was justifying intervention in Iraq based on “the presence of US troops on Iraqi soil posing a threat to [Iranian] national security, then this danger is over now.
With it ends all thinking, calculations and possibilities for interference in Iraqi affairs.”
Later in the interview, he noted that the presence of 3,400 Mojahedin-e Khalq members was another source of friction with Iran. He said he would have more leverage with which to rebut Iranian intervention once they were all gone. “There will no longer be an argument for Iran to interfere in Iraqi affairs [directly] or through some [political] blocs and parties,” Maliki said.
Maliki said he was now worried more about interference from Turkey than Iran.
Maliki sounded a very nationalist note. “I’ll confront the meddling of any country in the world,” he said. “For me, Iraqi sovereignty is above all else. I am a friend to all countries—a friend of America, a friend of Russia, a friend of Iran, a friend of Turkey, and a friend of the
Arabs—even those that insist on boycotting us. But what separates us is the interest of Iraq and its sovereignty. Here, relations come to an end. When relations with those countries clash with the sovereignty of Iraq, that’s when relations come to an end.”
Maliki was not asked for and did not give any specific ex- amples of Iranian interference. But one unnamed Iraqi official told the Journal Maliki would never have won a second term as prime minister last year without first making a commitment to
Iran and its Iraqi allies that he would get the US troops out of Iraq.
It should be noted that Maliki did not say that Iranian interventions would end with the US withdrawal, he merely said that “if” the US presence was the justification for Iranian intervention, then there was now no rationale for intervention. But the Journal failed to ask him if he believed the US and Mojahedin presence were really the reasons for Iranian intervention.
Most analysts believe the Islamic Republic will continue to intervene because it wants to make certain that Iraq, at the very least, poses no threat to Iran.