This guy is really starting to piss George off. He doesn't understand how the game is played with The Decider. Kind of like Mo Green in "The Godfather:" "You don't buy me out. I buy you out." Check out the latest token of Nouri al-Maliki's epic ingratitude:
"BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq's national security adviser said Tuesday his country will not accept any security deal with the United States unless it contains specific dates for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces. The comments by Mouwaffak al-Rubaie were the strongest yet by an Iraqi official about the deal now under negotiation with U.S. officials. They came a day after Iraq's prime minister first said publicly that he expects the pending troop deal with the United States to have some type of timetable for withdrawal. President Bush has said he opposes a timetable. The White House said Monday it did not believe Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was proposing a rigid timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals."
My favorite part, of course, is where President Bush "opposes a timetable." He's always opposed a timetable. It's worked with that group of Scyphozoa of the phylum Cnidaria (you know them as jellyfish) otherwise known as the Democratic majority in Congress, Man O' War Harry Reid, and Steny "the Stomolophus meleagris " Hoyer and the other invertebrates who keep caving into Bush. They timidly tried suggesting timetables in funding legislation but Bush told them to stop it. "Take 'em out!" he snarled, and they quickly did so, expelling water from their combination mouth/anus to propel themselves away to safety (Cnidaria have incomplete digestive systems so that one orifice does double duty - you know, they really should run for Congress).
Of course, Nouri's just being political. Provincial elections are coming up in the fall and he knows that the overwhelming majority of everyday Iraqis want Americans out of their country. On the order of two-thirds, and they've felt that way for a long time. As wonderful as we've been, they can't seem to wait till we're gone. The party that delivers on ousting the foreign occupiers has the inside track on loading up the local governing councils with their sectarian cronies.
Meanwhile, Bush is finding this whole thing a revoltin' development. The oil deals, at long last, were beginning to fall into place, just ahead of the United Nations eviction notice on December 31, 2008. We lose our legal cover for occupying Iraq after that, and you know what a stickler Bush is for doing things legally. And you probably also appreciate why this thing is such an 11th hour rush job; it's a quality shared by many alcoholics. He procrastinates and just can't seem to get things done. Look around the country and the world and see all the stuff he's left undone, things he started work on seven years ago and then put aside. Two-state solution for Israel/Palestine? He's workin' on it. Rebuilding New Orleans? Remember the Big Speech in Jackson Square? Ummmm.... I was just about to do that! Balance the budget? 30% of the national debt accumulated in the history of the country has accrued under Bush's "stewardship." Capture Osama bin Laden? Bring a single prisoner to trial in Guantanamo after he rushed through that Military Commissions Act in the fall of 2006? Look, I meant to tell you, I was going to do that next week...The one thing the dude's good at is getting Congress to pass bills exonerating him from past criminal conduct. I'll give him that. He spends an inordinate amount of time doing it, and I don't why Congress keeps complying...well, I do actually. Note that "Godfather" reference. Cheney must have watched that a hundred times, I'll betcha. The idea is you make everybody (or key players in the leadership, like Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman) into "made men." Brief them on illegal wiretapping, spell out the torture techniques years before anyone else knows, and then you've got them. What are they gonna do? They have to let you off the hook.
But Nouri is from, shall we say, a different tradition. Worked in the anti-Saddam Shiite underground, a very dangerous line of work, with a .000000000000000000000000000000001% margin of error, the penalty being a sulfuric acid transfusion. Nouri's were not the kind of mean streets where Steny and Nancy and Harry made their bones. A little more real, shall we say. Grittier. A desperate situation for Nancy Pelosi would be the discovery of a phylloxera infestation at one of her vineyard properties up in the wine country. Nouri, on the other hand, probably knows more about hardball than even L'il George himself, whose knowledge of the subject is typified by his decision to trade Sammy Sosa. So if we want to stay in Iraq under the terms of a Status of Forces Agreement after January 1, 2009, it's going to be on Nouri's terms, and I think The Decider will find that his veto power does not extend too far out into the Atlantic, and certainly not across the Tigris & Euphrates. There may be a phased withdrawal, it may take a few years, but I think Nouri is going to get us out of there unless we can get Nouri out of there first and replace him with someone a little more malleable, a more Chalabi-esque Arab perhaps.
But here's a bet: I think ol' Nouri can see that one coming. He survived by staying one step ahead of the occupiers for a long time, after all. He's working on his home turf, and I doubt that those elections in the fall are going to be tabulated on Diebold machines.
No comments:
Post a Comment