Iraqi VP thinks Iran behind arrest warrant on him

Washington Times:

Iraq’s vice president says that Iran is “definitely” behind Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s move to jail him on terror charges, saying it is “not a coincidence” that his arrest warrant was announced the day after the last U.S. troops left Iraq.

“Definitely Iran was involved,” Tariq al-Hashemi told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview, speaking by phone late Wednesday from a Kurdish town in northern Iraq. “My dear friend, they have … staff now in the government and in the parliament. They are representing Iran.”

Mr. al-Hashemi said he has been a consistent critic of the “intervention of Iran in every respect of my country.”

“They are interfering in politics, in the economy, in social life, in education, in everything,” he said of Iran’s Shiite leadership. “They are becoming a major player in political decision-making. They are threatening our country’s sovereignty, so I was one of the major protesters against this policy.”

Mr. al-Maliki, a Shiite, issued an arrest warrant for Mr. al-Hashemi, a Sunni, on Monday, accusing the vice president of running “death squads” that assassinated Shiiite government officials during sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007.

Mr. al-Hashemi, who is staying in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, has vehemently denied the charges, but he told The Timesthat he believes he could never receive a fair trial from the Iraqi judiciary.

“All Iraqis are very much aware about the nature of our judicial system,” he said. “It is not transparent, it is not neutral, it is not independent. It’s become a puppet of the government and certainly al-Maliki.”

Mr. al-Hashemi said he is willing to face trial before “a neutral and more transparent and more professional, independent court, which I think is available here” in the Kurdish region.

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The arrest warrant against the VP and the threats against the Kurds suggest a sectarian and ethnic unraveling in Iraq without the presence of a mediator like the US military.  Maliki does not have enough trust in the Sunni and Kurdish groups to command respect or agreement as to the legitimacy of his complaints.  That is as much his fault as theirs and he was in a better position to prove legitimacy and failed.

The killer blast today in Iraq only adds an exclamation point on the divisions.