Maliki postpones Bush summit after memo leak

It was the meeting with Bush that Moqtada al-Sadr demanded that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refuse to attend, with the threat that - if Maliki did attend - al-Sadr may walk from the Iraqi coalition and trigger the collapse of the entire administration.

Bush insisted that the meeting go ahead although the very fact that it was scheduled to take place in Jordan rather than in Iraq told it's own story of the true state of play in that "liberated" country. It is now simply too dangerous a place for the President of the USA to even venture there.

Sadr has now suspended the participation of his six members of the Iraqi government:

"The Sadr group suspends its membership in parliament and in the cabinet as a protest against the visit, which is considered as a provocation to the Iraqi people," a statement read. However, Mr Sadr's supporters stressed that the move did not represent a permanent boycott.

In the end Maliki has postponed the meeting, but not because al-Sadr demanded that he do so, rather it's because of a leak from within the Bush administration to the New York Times which highlights the Bush camps lack of faith in Maliki himself and their deep misgivings about his ability to curb the violence currently sweeping Iraq.

The 12-hour delay was officially to allow Mr Bush the chance to have a bilateral meeting with the host, Jordan's King Abdullah, but White House officials were forced to assure Mr Maliki that he still had the US president's confidence.

The memo - leaked to the New York Times and confirmed as accurate by administration officials - exposed a relationship of mutual dependence clouded by distrust and strained by the steadily escalating civil war inside Iraq.

The situation in Iraq is getting more severe by the day and it's a further sign of the desperation within the Bush camp that they are once again considering lining up another Iraqi Prime Minister as fall guy for the failings of their war plans.

The memo, from the US national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, to the president, questions Mr Maliki's readiness to curb the radical Shia militias responsible for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Sunnis in the Iraqi capital. Writing on November 8, a week after meeting the Iraqi prime minister, Mr Hadley argued the "reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not sufficient to turn his good intentions into action".

Hadley has many other suggestions including providing money to other groups in return for them supporting Maliki, making it theoretically possible for him to break away from his Shia base and form a broader based secular coalition.

The memo said the US should help Mr Maliki to form a new political base drawn from moderate politicians from all Iraq's ethnic communities, as a substitute for "his current narrow reliance on Shia actors". Creating that new base might require "monetary support to moderate groups that have been seeking to break with larger, more sectarian parties".

The memo also asks Saudi Arabia "to cut off any public or private funding to insurgents or death squads from the region and lean on Syria to terminate its support for Ba'athist and insurgent leaders". The reward for doing so would be linked to "other areas in which Saudi Arabia wants to see US action".

A blatant reference to the Israeli/Palestine dispute and a possible explanation for Olmert's sudden embrace of a ceasefire in Gaza the other day. I said at the time that it was possibly linked to Bush's visit to Jordan, and here we have the proof in black and white.

Hadley is fair enough to note that pushing Maliki too far "could force him to failure" and the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, sought to reassure everyone that "the president has confidence in prime minister Maliki".

However, Maliki would do well to remember just how long Rumsfeld lasted after Bush and Co. declared their "confidence" in him.

This is a brutal group of self-preservationists who will go to any lengths to avoid accepting any responsibility for the failures of their own policies. Maliki's position is an impossible one, as Hadley's memo attests. Although Hadley is very unfair when he suggests that perhaps Maliki is "misrepresenting his intentions". In those words lie the Bush administration's get-out-clause.

It's not that they are asking Maliki to perform an impossible task, but rather that he holds some hidden malevolent intention to fail.

This is the problem with the Bush administration and their neo-con belief that things can be willed into existence. Whenever reality fails to shape itself to their impossible demands, certain individuals will be singled out as lacking the necessary will or, worse, intentionally failing.

Bush has always thought that his intention to "stick to the course" was enough to guarantee success in Iraq. He has failed to realise that there is a chasm of difference between a goal - the establishing of a functioning democracy in Iraq - and a plan - how to establish such a democracy.

Without the latter, the former is only a pipe dream. No-one can doubt that Bush had a goal, but I have yet to see anything that looks remotely like a plan.

And the blame for that lies squarely on the shoulders of Bush, not Maliki.

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tag: Bush, Maliki, , Iraq war, "Stay the course", War On Terror