John Burns, war corrospondent for the NYT, offered commentary from Baghdad, on the local reaction to the Bush Escalation, on The Charlie Rose Show last night. I was pleased to find the text of his remarks in this mornings New York Times, which you can read, in full, here.
In Baghdad, Bush Policy Is Met With Resentment
The ying and yang of The Speech, and all of the testimony paraded before Congressional Committees yesterday by Administration mouth pieces, centered around the benchmarks the Iraqi Government must achieve, so we can declare victory, before we bomb Iran.
It seems that there is just one problem. Hints have been seeping in that Maliki is neither pleased, nor intending to be cooperative with the Escalation.
Iraq’'s Shiite-led government offered only a grudging endorsement on Thursday of President Bush’'s proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in an effort to curb sectarian violence and regain control of Baghdad.
The Iraqi leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, failed to appear at a news conference and avoided any public comment.
Our "partner" in "rebuilding" Iraq will not even make a public statement about the Bush Plan, instead sending a PR flack out to offer acknowledgement, not support.
While senior officials in Washington have presented the new war plan as an American adaptation of proposals that were first put to Mr. Bush by Mr. Maliki when the two men met in the Jordanian capital of Amman in November, the picture that is emerging in Baghdad is quite different. What Mr. Maliki wanted, his officials say, was in at least one crucial respect the opposite of what Mr. Bush decided: a lowering of the American profile in the war, not the increase Mr. Bush has ordered.
Bush won't listen to the Congress, the Voters, his Daddy's friends, or the Military leaders who have to clean up his messes. Now we learn that word on the ground is, he is not even listening to the man charged with carrying out his new strategery.
As details of the Bush plan became known on Wednesday, Iraqi officials said that the new arrangements would give Iraqis operational control of the new push in Baghdad. But...they were quick to pull back on Thursday, acknowledging that Baghdad would remain under American operational control at least until later this year.
If this fell a long way short of the plan for full Iraqi control in Baghdad that Mr. Maliki set out in November, his officials were at pains to say that the prime minister would decide the issue of most concern to the Iraqi leader: whether, and when, Iraqi and American forces would be allowed to move in force into Sadr City.
Wasn't full control of where and when operations are carried out one of the prime "failures" Bush alluded to in The Speech? Didn't he specifically say that Maliki's past interference was a major cause of our "failure to secure Baghdad"? Well, it seems Georgie has screwed that one up too, because:
Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, at a news conference on Wednesday, said that American and Iraqi troops would be free to go into "all parts of Baghdad, including Sadr City" and that one benchmark in the plan was that there would be no "political interference" with military operations or attempts to protect death squad leaders.
Then Burns notes:
A Shiite political leader who has worked closely with the Americans in the past said the Bush benchmarks appeared to have been drawn up in the expectation that Mr. Maliki would not meet them. "He cannot deliver the disarming of the militias," the politician said, asking that he not be named because he did not want to be seen as publicly criticizing the prime minister. "He cannot deliver a good program for the economy and reconstruction. He cannot deliver on services. This is a matter of fact. There is a common understanding on the American side and the Iraqi side."
It's a set up! The President of the United States is rolling the dice with our troops lives, so he can take down the very person upon which every lie since the last Iraqi election has been predicated.
Is it the failure to get that oil contract drafted and signed?