In October 2011, Barack Obama and his national security committee sat down for the most important conference call they had held on
Iraq. On the videolink from Baghdad was
Nouri al-Maliki, a man whom the US had backed as a second-term leader a year earlier.
Folders and briefing pads were piled in front of the Americans. In Baghdad, Maliki sat with only a translator. He wanted no discussion about an extension of the US presence in Iraq, not even a token contribution for training or mentoring. Maliki's stance was welcomed by many in the room, who viewed Iraq as a politically consuming misadventure.
But they were just as surprised as the hawks at the Iraqi leader's defiance. After eight long years, most of them as partners of sorts, it had come to this; there was no longer anything to negotiate. Maliki's Iraq would go it alone; the US could turn the lights off when it left.
For almost three years since, that seminal meeting has defined the relationship between the Obama White House and Maliki – a rising single-minded strongman and the increasing irrelevance in Iraq of a conquering superpower.
As US eyes turned away from Iraq, Iraqi eyes looked elsewhere for support. Some in Washington began to wonder whether, after almost $1tn (£590bn) and close to 4,500 combat losses, Iraq really wanted a strategic partnership with the US at all. The turmoil surrounding the Arab uprisings put answers to that on hold, for a while at least. It also pushed Maliki towards a deeper relationship with Iran.
With much of the Sunni Arab world in uproar, Maliki wanted the safety in numbers that his Shia neighbours offered. While embracing Iran, Maliki put distance between his government and Iraq's Sunni minority, arresting several tribal leaders, laying siege to a protest camp in Ramadi, and brazenly issuing an arrest warrant for the Sunni former vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi days after US forces left.
He set about co-opting key institutions left behind by the Americans; the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, which was soon stacked with officials from his Dawa party, and Iraq's elite special forces unit, which became his praetorian guard.
Some in Washington started believing that Maliki's moves were consolidating power along nakedly sectarian lines. "It was more out of making sure that power could never be stripped from him," said one senior US diplomat.
Another American official who acted as senior US adviser to the Iraqi government from 2004-11 said: "The only thing that I saw with my eyes that could be construed as sectarian was his appointments, especially in the military." While they were not all sectarian, most were; and the competence of the candidate was not an issue.
Evermore disturbed, Washington protested loudly and made calls for political inclusiveness. But the former occupier no longer had the leverage – or apparently the will – to force Maliki to act.
Today, as the state he tried to build through a ruthless consolidation of power, and a strong dose of paranoia, crumbles around him, critics and foes are circling. First among them is the US. Slighted by three years of neglect and stunned by the three-day capitulation of the Iraqi military, Washington is strongly signalling it has lost faith in Maliki.
The embattled leader has sensed the change in mood and on Wednesday said
he would not resign in return for US airstrikes against insurgents.
On Thursday, when asked if Maliki should step aside, Obama said: "It is not our job to choose Iraq's leaders, but I don't think there is any secret that, right now at least, there are deep divisions between Sunni, Shia and Kurdish leaders."
He said
the White House had told Maliki that "as long as those deep divisions continue or worsen" the central government would be unable to stem the sectarian crisis engulfing the country.
Obama urged the Iraqis to form a new government, holding out the inducement that it would "make it much easier to partner than it is right now".
The move away from Maliki is precipitous. In testimony to the Senate on Wednesday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, said repeatedly that the Iraqi government had failed on its commitment to combat sectarianism.
More ominously for a government that urgently seeks
US military aid, Dempsey and the defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, told a Senate panel already champing at the bit for the Iraqi prime minister's downfall that military intervention would be futile without concerted action from Maliki to embrace Sunnis.
