Wages of Sin, We Keep Paying

Posted by Spencer Ackerman, Attackerman at 1:06 PM on May 16, 2008.

Amazingly, the Bush administration can’t figure out just why the Arab governments it occasionally flirts with undermining/subverting/overthrowing — and whose citizens it reserves the right to abduct, imprison, kill and certainly demonize — won’t cooperate with its proxy Iraq government!

And look at the alibi. As a wise man once said, you want it to be one way –

But U.S. and Iraqi officials dismissed Arab security concerns as a smokescreen. “If I believed the issue were purely one of security, it would be one thing,” a senior Bush administration official said. The Iraqi government has offered the Arabs space inside the fortified Green Zone, where the U.S. embassy and much of the Iraqi government is located.

The real basis for Arab reluctance, the U.S. official said, “is political. It’s a choice, an acknowledgement that there is a new Iraq, of recognizing that its political structures, its constitution, its government, is in fact legitimate.”

– but it’s the other way.

The Arabs, unsurprisingly, say that is nonsense. “Iraq is an Arab country and we want the same things the Americans want,” an Arab official said. But beyond diplomatic security, he and others said they are not convinced that the Basra offensive proved that Maliki is ready to stand up to Tehran. They also note that Maliki’s government has so far failed to incorporate more than a fraction of the largely Sunni Awakening security forces backed by the U.S. military into the Iraqi police and military forces.

Several Arab officials questioned whether Iraq’s military offensives against Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia were staged to crack down on “criminals,” as Maliki has said, or to benefit Sadr’s Shiite rivals, who are allied with the prime minister. Administration officials raised that possibility themselves immediately after the Basra assault, one Arab noted, before they decided to hail it as evidence of Maliki’s willingness to go after his co-religionists.

Several Arab officials attributed their hesitation partly to what they describe as Iraqi government incompetence. Egypt has complained that it has yet to receive the body of its assassinated ambassador, and also that political factions in Baghdad have been unable to agree on Iraq’s envoy to Cairo. A Saudi official noted that while Iraq complains about Riyadh’s failure to forgive billions in debt, Baghdad has not provided the necessary paperwork and has paid no principal or interest for the past 20 years. Still, the Saudi official said, “nobody is taking them to the credit bureau.”

It’s almost as if telling the Arab world to snack on ‘em before you need it to support your imperial fantasies isn’t an effective strategy!

Tagged as: iraq, bush administration, maliki government