[NYTr] Don't Carpool with Nouri al-Maliki

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[The first part of Alexander Cockburn's weekly column, all of which is
worth reading on this Sunday. Second half, a debate with Phyllis
Bennis, is coming up. -NY Transfer]

Counterpunch - Aug 25, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08252007.html

Don't Carpool with Nouri al-Maliki

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

As he heads for the office these days Nouri al-Maliki should bid his
family especially tender farewells. If the patterns of US foreign
policy are any guide, the Iraqi prime minister is a very poor insurance
risk.

On Monday August 20 a leading Democratic senator, Carl Levin of
Michigan and chairman of the Armed Services Committee returned from a
weekend outing to Iraq and declared publicly that Iraq's parliament
should remove al-Maliki from power. "The Maliki government is
nonfunctional," Levin declared, "and cannot produce a political
settlement because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian
leaders."

The next day Hillary Rodham Clinton, front-runner of Democrats seeking
the nomination of their party for the presidency went before the annual
convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and reiterated her senate
colleague's call. She said that al-Maliki should be replaced by a "less
divisive and more unifying figure."

The final grim news for al-Maliki came on Wednesday when President Bush
affirmed confidence in the prime minister, declaring him to be a fine
fellow.

Levin, Clinton and Bush all simultaneously declared that they believe
the briefings of the United States military commanders in Iraq. They
exult that the "surge", advocated and presided over by General David
Petraeus last winter, is now working. Baghdad is more secure.
Casualties are down. The sectarian groupings in Iraq have been checked.
Nation-building can proceed.

None of these chirpy bulletins has anything to do with the actual
situation on the ground in Iraq, where the extremely hot summer months
have seen a regular annual drop in activities by Iraq's resistance
groups. Even so, car bombings in Baghdad car bombings in Baghdad in
July were 5 per cent higher than before the "surge" began and there has
been a corresponding rise in civilian casualties from explosions.
Meanwhile there are graphic reports of the extreme exhaustion of US
troops, forced into multiple tours and extended time on active duty
because of the overall shortage in manpower and equipment.

Nor can any silver lining be detected in the larger political military
picture, in terms of erosion the Shi'a majority coalition, seriously
reducing the power of Moqtada al-Sadr, or denting the Sunni resistance.

But here on the home front, Levin, Clinton and other leading Democrats
are determined not to be wrong-footed by White House attacks accusing
them of stabbing America's fighting men and women in the back by
questioning the surge's supposed success. On an hourly basis, the
right-wing radio demagogues are accusing them of just such treachery.
Flag-wagging and drum-thumping are traditional at Veterans of Foreign
Wars' conventions.

In a rhetorical counter-move, the Democrats emphasize the failure of
Bush's man, al-Maliki, to resolve Iraq's political divisions at equal
speed. Amid their rather hollow assertions of confidence in al-Maliki,
Bush and the Republicans recognize that al-Maliki is expendable and can
be forced out, just as his predecessor was ditched.

Here's where al-Maliki should take a look at a dark episode in Vietnam
not long before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November,
1963. A few weeks earlier in that same month a coup, code-named
Operation Bravo Two, pushed by U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and
the CIA, and executed by South Vietnamese officers led swiftly to the
murder of South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem and Diem's brother.

Just as is happening today in Iraq the White House had concluded that
their chosen man Diem had become an inconvenience to a political
schedule that demanded "progress" , a feinted reduction in US troops
pending the 1964 campaign year. Hence the coup and consequent demise of
the bothersome Diem and his brother. Friendly witness claim that the
Kennedys were deeply shocked at news of the murders.If so, it was akin
to the shock of Henry II after the assassination of Thomas Becket. The
killing of Diem committed the US more deeply than ever to blood­stained
years of "nation-building".

In the end the Americans withdrew because they were defeated militarily
and politically by the Vietnamese.

Such is the history al-Maliki can meditate each day.