I Ask You, What Are We Doing in Iraq?

Yesterday, the Associated Press posted a story with this lead paragraph: “An angry Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki disavowed a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid in the capital's Sadr City slum Wednesday, and criticized the top U.S. military and diplomatic representatives in Iraq for saying his government needs to set a timetable to curb violence in the country.” In case anyone has a short memory, George W. Bush and Colin Powell lied us into a war with Iraq in 2003 so that the USA could implement the Bush administration plan to take over the Middle East and its oil. And Dick Cheney’s man in the Department of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has so botched the war that now in 2006 Iraq is in total chaos, is in the midst of a civil war and 2,809 American soldiers have been killed for no reason. Bear in mind that Iraq President Jalal Talabani named Nouri al-Maliki Prime Minister-designate after al-Jaafari was removed as the candidate. Bear in mind that the president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, has been the USA’s man in Iraq since the Gulf War of 1991. And further bear in mind that the Bush administration’s Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said that Maliki was “someone who is independent of Iran…someone who sees himself as an Arab”. Plus, since Khalilzad said Iran wanted Jaafari to be president of Iraq, Maliki’s nomination over Jaafari was a feather in Khalilizad’s cap as a negotiator (read, Khalilzad had the power to give orders to Talabani). So, the facts show us that despite the bullshit about free and democratic elections, all of the Bush administration’s handpicked ass-kissers are now in positions of power in Iraq. And the guy the US made Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki has been told by his USA bosses that he should appear to have a mind of his own, so he got up on his hind legs about the Sadr City raid and said, “We will ask for clarification to what has happened and we will review this issue with the Multinational Forces so that it will not be repeated." But to assure the Bush administration that he really is still in its back pocket, Maliki said, “I affirm that this government represents the will of the people and no one has the right to impose a timetable on it.” The majority of the people in the United States, the majority of the people in Iraq and the entire rest of the world want to impose a timetable on the US getting out of Iraq. The Bush administration doesn’t want it and therefore its toady, the Prime Minister of Iraq, dutifully said he doesn’t want it. Meanwhile, the President of the United States is crazily denying that he ever said the US would “stay the course” in Iraq and he is making pronouncements like, “I know the American people understand the stakes in Iraq”. Which is my point. America has no stakes in Iraq and the American people know that full well. Only the Bush administration and its puppet government in Iraq have stakes in Iraq.