Bush Attacks Maliki Over Iran's Influence On Iraq's Security And Future

Iran is now taking key roles in Iraqi reconstruction and the economy, by signing up to build billions of dollars worth of power plants, to be centred in prominently Shiite locales.

President Bush is taking offense at Iran cutting key energy deals with Iran, and has attacked prime minister Nuri al-Maliki for recent statements that Iran was not a dangerous presence in Iraq and could play a "constructive" role in bringing security to the world's terrorism capital.

From Al Jazeera :

The US president has rebuked Iraq's prime minister for speaking too favourably about Iran. "If the signal [from Nuri al-Maliki] is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart-to-heart with my friend, the prime minister. Because I don't believe they are constructive," George Bush said.

Al-Maliki had thanked Iran for its "positive and constructive" work in "providing security and fighting terrorism in Iraq" on a visit to Tehran, according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.

Iranian leaders told the visiting al-Maliki that they wanted Iraq's friendship and would do all they could to boost Iraqi security.

Al-Maliki's talks appeared to confirm the increasingly warm relations that have emerged between majority Shia Iraq and overwhelmingly Shia Iran following the fall of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.

Bush is making a habit of insulting the leaders of nations the Americans are supposed to be liberating from the clutches of Al Qaeda and terrorists.

He warned Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, on Monday during a visit to the US presidential retreat at Camp David to be more suspicious of Iran after the Afghan leader had brushed aside US accusations that Tehran was arming the Taliban.

Iran, with a majority of Shia Muslims like Iraq, has been an important political player in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion. Tehran denies Washington's accusations that it is supplying weapons to fighters to fuel violence, and instead blames the US military presence.

Baghdad has urged both countries to negotiate and not fight out their differences on Iraqi soil.

That fight would appear to be already well underway.

Iraq : Maliki Demands United States Arm His Government Properly

Rips Into Bush And Rice For Threats To His Government

The US wanted the Iraqi government to develop some teeth, and they have. But they're baring those teeth at the US. He has railed against Secretary Of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush for their criticisms and comments where they pretty well threatened his government if they didn't crack down on the Shiite militias controlling many suburbs of Iraq.

Secretary Rice has since apologised to Maliki for saying his government was existing on "borrowed time".

Prime minister Maliki is demanding the United States give the Iraqi Army the weapons they need to clear out the militias and insurgents. But the US is reluctant to give superior weaponry to a government they still claim is in cahoots with the Iranians.

Maliki has said that the huge death tolls in Baghdad are partly the fault of the US and BushCo. policies, and if the Iraqi Army had been properly, and more effectively, armed sooner, then the casualties wouldn't have been so high.

Meanwhile, in Baghdad, US forces and the Iraqi Army are reported to be cracking down on Moqtada al-Sadr's Medhi Army. Gun fights in the streets and much chaos and bloodshed for civilians is expected to follow.

From the London Times :

America’s refusal to give Baghdad’s security forces sufficient guns and equipment has cost a great number of lives, the Iraqi Prime Minister said yesterday.

Nouri al-Maliki said the insurgency had been bloodier and prolonged because Washington had refused to part with equipment. If it released the necessary arms, US forces could “drastically” cut their numbers in three to six months, he told The Times.

In a sign of the tense relations with Washington, he chided the US for suggesting his Government was living on “borrowed time”.

Such criticism boosted Iraq’s extremists, he said, and was more a reflection of “some kind of crisis situation” in Washington after the Republicans’ midterm election losses. Mr al-Maliki conceded that his administration had made mistakes over the hanging of Saddam Hussein. But he refused to accept all criticism over the execution. When asked about the Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s attack on Iraq’s capital punishment laws, Mr al-

Maliki cited the Italians’ summary killing of Benito Mussolini and his stringing-up from a lamppost.

Asked how long Iraq would require US troops, Mr al-Maliki said: “If we succeed in implementing the agreement between us to speed up the equipping and providing weapons to our military forces, I think that within three to six months our need for American troops will dramatically go down. That is on condition that there are real, strong efforts to support our military forces and equipping and arming them.”

The US Government is wary of handing over large amounts of military hardware to the Iraqis because it has sometimes ended up in the hands of militias and insurgents.

Although Mr al-Maliki’s tone was measured throughout, he is clearly irritated at US criticism that he has failed to curb Shia militias.

Robert Gates, the new US Defence Secretary, said that Mr al-Maliki could lose his job if he failed to stop communal bloodshed and Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, gave a warning that he was living on “borrowed time” and that American patience was running out.

Challenged on the point, Mr al-Maliki remarked acidly: “Certain officials are going through a crisis. Secretary Rice is expressing her own point of view if she thinks that the Government is on borrowed time, whether it is borrowed time for the Iraqi Government or American Administration. I don’t think we are on borrowed time.”

He added: “I wish that we could receive strong messages of support from the US so we don’t give some boost to the terrorists and make them feel that they might have achieved success. I believe that such statements give moral boosts to the terrorists and push them towards making an extra effort and making them believe that they have defeated the American Administration, but I can tell you that they haven’t defeated the Iraqi Government.”

He rejected the accusation that his Government was “lenient” with Shia militias, saying 400 al-Mahdi Army members had been arrested in recent days, in crackdowns in southern towns such as Karbala, Samawa, Diwaniya and al-Nasiriya.

And he insisted that he was prepared to fulfil his promises to Washington and confront the militias of Shia parties within his coalition, including Moqtada al-Sadr’s widely feared al-Mahdi Army. He conceded that some “sectarian” acts were being perpetrated. But he said there would not be a civil war because Sunni and Shia had lived in peace for many years

A report on the 'war' Maliki is now said to be raging against the Medhi Army and Shiite militias, just as he promised the Americans he would.

From the Washington Times :

Mahdi Army fighters said yesterday they were under siege in their Sadr City stronghold as U.S. and Iraqi troops killed or seized key commanders in nighttime raids. Two commanders of the Shi'ite militia said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stopped protecting the group under pressure from Washington and threats from Sunni Muslim Arab governments.

The commanders' accounts of a growing siege mentality inside the organization could represent a tactical and propaganda feint, but there was mounting evidence the militia was increasingly off balance and had ordered its gunmen to melt into the population. To avoid capture, commanders report no longer using cell phones and fighters are removing their black uniforms and hiding their weapons during the day.

Violence continued in Baghdad yesterday, claiming 59 lives, including 10 from a triple car bombing at a vegetable market.

An al Qaeda-linked coalition of Iraqi Sunni insurgents claimed responsibility for an attack on a convoy of the Washington-based National Democratic Institute. The attack Wednesday killed Andrea Parhamovich, 28, of Perry, Ohio, and three security contractors from Hungary, Croatia and Iraq.

During much of his nearly eight months in office, Mr. al-Maliki has blocked or ordered an end to many U.S.-led operations against the Mahdi Army, which is run by radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the prime minister's key political backer. But he reportedly had a change of heart in late November while going into a meeting in Jordan with President Bush.

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Tonight, US President Bush will unveil his new plans for how the Iraq War is to be fought by the United States in the coming 12 to 24 months.

He is expected to announce that some 20,000 more troops will be "surged" into Baghdad, and that the American forces will team up with the Iraqi Army to hammer first the Sunni insurgency, and then the Shiite militias.

Considering that the Maliki government was thrust into power, and remains in power today, due only to the political, social and street fighting powers of the Shiite militias, the crackdown on those aligned with Bush's nemesis, Moqtada al-Sadr, in particular, will be a long time coming.

Shiite-affiliated Army officers will not go after their 'brothers'. So it will be up to the US to hit the Shiite slums to rout the 'terrorists' and 'extremists', while the Iraqi Army slaughters more Sunnis.

That is, if Bush's 'The New New Way Forward Plan' ever sees the cold, hard light of World War 4 reality, that is.

Bush faces an incredible amount of opposition to his plans, before they've ever been announced.

Beset by leaks, Republican dissent, international condemnation and reflections on how his plans are similar to Vietnam War troop surges, President Bush could find himself announcing war plans that will not only be opposed by Congress, but by the very soldiers he intends to send.

And that spells mutiny.

US Congress, now controlled by the Democrats, may even block Bush from getting the funding he needs to go forward with his escalation plans for the Iraq War.

While pro-war Republicans, the blogger armies of anti-Left, and the corporate opionista, will wail and scream about how the Democrats "don't support the troops", relatively few Americans will back them up, or speak out in support of Bush's plans.

In fact, USA Today features a poll and cover story today that spells out a tide of dissent amongst Americans unmatched in the entire war-time history :

Those surveyed oppose the idea of increased troop levels by 61%-36%. Approval of the job Bush is doing in Iraq has sunk to 26%, a record low.

The poll also reveals 80% believe the war has not gone as well as BushCo planned, and more than half directly blame the president for this catastrophjc failure. Only 41%, however, blame the Iraqi government for the increasing level of violence in greater Baghdad.

That Americans roundly blame BushCo. for the bloodbath growing bigger by the day across most of Iraq spells disaster for the Republicans PR campaign of trying to convince Americans that the Iraqis are now responsible for the violence in their country, not America. Clearly Americans still believe that it is up to BushCo. to stop the bloodshed.

Letters To The Editor of newspapers across the US, talk radio, the comments section of blogs and news sites, are filling up with American dissent, and its getting angrier, and more aggressive.

There is growing talk of American National Guard and Army Reserve forces refusing to follow BushCo. orders to deploy, or redeploy, to Baghdad in the coming months, and some commentators in mainstream media are speculating that their own president might not even "make it" to the end of his second presidential term.


Meanwhile in Iraq, gun battles have raged across Baghdad, and a dozen other cities and major populations centres across Iraq, leaving more than 50 people dead.

The fury that erupted following the very public execution of Saddam Hussein has not abated, and there are reports that Sunni insurgents hung dozens of hooded men from nooses slug over power poles and electricity wires in Baghdad slums.

While the Iraqi Army may go after the Sunni insurgents in BushCo.'s coming war plans, American forces are expected to directly take on the Shiite militias. But they can't even get into the outer streets of the militia enclave Sadr City, without encountering snipers and IED attacks.

Reaching the core of the massive slum, from which mortars and rockets are being launched into Sunni neighbourhoods, and American bases, is expected to cost many American lives.

But even a troop surge is unlikely to bring peace, or even a reduction in violence and unrest to Baghdad, and Iraq in turn, in the coming months.

The new American commander for Iraq thinks it may still be another two or three years before they can talk seriously about a more peaceful, more stable Iraq :

Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, who took up the second ranking U.S. military post in Iraq a month ago, told reporters the American public would need patience to see a stable Iraq but also said he hoped Iraqi troops could be in control of Baghdad within months after a new operation mounted with U.S. help.

Speaking ahead of Washington's expected announcement of a new approach in Iraq, Odierno said: "The mission now is to defeat the ... insurgency and to train Iraqi security forces. "Over time we can accomplish the mission. That time I put two or three years from now. The issue becomes are we willing to wait two or three years or do we want to speed it up?"

Although President Bush has recently adopted the line, "We're not winning in Iraq...but we're not losing," he only came to make such a frank admission because the majority view of the American public could no longer be ignored.

Since the insurgency began, shortly after the Coalition of the Willing swept into Baghdad in April 2003, BushCo. has maintained that they are "winning in Iraq". This stance confused and angered many Americans, and the senior ranks of the US military, because only a blind fool couldn't see that the war was not being won. At least, it wasn't being won in the way that we were told it would be won. That is fast and decisively with few American casualties.

But Bush wasn't lying all those long months of bodybags and American flag draped coffins.

The War For Iraq's Oil was being won. And now, victory is close.

Chris Floyd, a truth-teller widely despised by Americans who like to deceive their fellow country men over the realities behind the Iraq War, explains why :

For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," say the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come.

This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion – indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush Administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land,

Bush is expected to also announce in his 'My Big Plan For Victory In Iraq' speech to sent benchmarks for the Iraq government, one of which will be finalising the future of Iraq's oil.

You don't need to guess what sort of pressure will be used to get that paperwork signed quick smart.

Expect a good number of the car bombings and assassinations of government ministers, and their families, to draw to a close shortly after the future of Iraq's oil wealth is signed over to the global fuel giants.


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The War For Iraq's Oil Has Almost Been Won