maliki

Read this great New York Times piece for a taste of how intractable the difficulties with reconciliation in Iraq are. To fully understand it, let’s imagine that instead of human beings, Iraq and the United States were populated by super-intelligent machines. Were you a RationalBot8000, you would say to your Iraqi counterpart, RationalBot8001, that the [...]

So it’s come to this.
McClatchy’s Leila Fadel reports that Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, is telling the obstinate Maliki government that unless it signs a Status of Forces Agreement with the U.S. before the end of the year, the U.S. is going to leave Iraq with no money, no security and [...]

The latest — and possibly final — text of an agreement on America’s future role in Iraq reveals that practically every effort made by the Bush White House to lock in the occupation as enduring U.S. foreign policy has failed.

My colleague Matt DeLong caught Sen. John McCain’s interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and passed along a quick discussion about the U.S.-Iraq basing deal that calls for a total withdrawal of all U.S. forces by Dec. 31, 2011. Long story short: Either McCain hasn’t read the latest text or he’s just making stuff up. (Transcript [...]

Prediction time. When the definitive history of the Bush administration’s prosecution of the Iraq war is written, its attempt to force the Iraqi government to sign a bilateral agreement authorizing an indefinite occupation will stand as its final massive blunder.
Let’s review. In November 2007, George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki agreed in [...]