Shadowy Iraqi Office Accused of Sectarian Agenda

[Mondor]

This is a major problem, but what keeps me awake is the fear that someone is going to exercise the Diem '63 option.

[tequila]

This is a major problem, but what keeps me awake is the fear that someone is going to exercise the Diem '63 option.

Bing West has been arguing in favor of this option for quite awhile now.

[UCrawford]

I wasn't trying to say that al-Maliki is pro-U.S....I seriously doubt that he is. At best the guy's U.S. neutral and simply thoroughly incapable of running the government...I'm more prone to believe that he's pretty much just another Shi'a politician who's not particularly fond of us (they remember what happened to the Shi'a after the first Gulf War) and is in hock to the militias (Badr Corps, SCIRI, Mahdi Army), but he was ingratiating enough to Bush personally that Bush and Rice were willing to give him the job (since they really couldn't stand al-Ja'afari). It doesn't really matter anyway, my point was that we can dump al-Maliki, but there's nobody out there who could do a better job with the Iraqi government in its current form.

Allawi is about as pro-U.S. as the Iraqis get, and he did the best he could while he was in charge, but the Iraqi people don't like or respect him enough to put him in charge...that's why his party got destroyed by the sectarian groups in the elections. There's no one out there who's going to be able to fix the Iraqi government without turning it into a dictatorship like Saddam's. And it's unlikely that the dictator who could pull that off would be pro-U.S.

[tequila]

Plan Puts Only Sunni Terrorists in Crosshairs of Iraqi Army - from my favorite neoconservative rag, the NY SUN.

[UCrawford]

Yup...that article pretty much summed it up. Those Shi'a politicians in power in the Iraqi government will either give the Shi'a militias a pass because they agree with what the militias are doing, or they'll give them a pass because they know they'll be the militias' next target if they go against them. Either way, the result is the same...in supporting the government our troops are taking sides in a sectarian war that's going to feature a lot of ethnic cleansing for no real payoff for us. I don't like the Dems, but I think Harry Reid nailed it right on the head about the Iraq war.

[marct]

From MEMRI

Documents Exposed by Egyptian Government Weekly Indicate Ties Between Iraqi PM and Iranian Revolutionary Guards

To view this Special Dispatch in HTML, visit:
http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD157307.

An investigative article by journalist Mahdi Mustafa, published March 31, 2007 in the Egyptian government weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, featured photographs of documents indicating that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has ties with Muqtada Al-Sadr and with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.(1)

The dispatch contains translations