Omar and Mohammed Fadhil are a pair of Baghdad bloggers who are editors for Pajamas Media. In their latest article, “Obama’s Fact-Fudging Mission in Iraq,” the duo manages to see the reality of Obama’s trip to the Middle East, as well as Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s motivation for his recent, and often confusing, political double-speak.
Obama is lucky in that his host, Prime Ministe Maliki, is also going through an election season. He’s even luckier that Maliki has been convinced by the close circle around him that Obama is going to win the American presidential race. The state-owned Al-Sabah quoted a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, as saying: “The change in the prime minister’s position has to do with his own perception of the political developments in the United States…Maliki thinks that Obama is most likely to win in the presidential election and that he will withdraw his country’s troops from Iraq as he pledged in his campaign.” The official added that Maliki sees that “he’s got to take preemptive steps before Obama gets to the White House.” [Ed: The link was part of the original article, and requires knowledge of Arabic language.]
Filed under: Barack Obama, Diplomacy, Election 2008, Iraq, Politics, Wordpress Political Blogs
I’m not entirely clear on how whether Obama is elected or not, the best pre-emptive step would be to agree with Obama if Obama’s wrong.
I’d imagine the best step would have been to denounce his plan while Maliki could still influence the election, not pander to him now and be unindelibly stuck in Obama’s bed while Obama implements a policy bad for his country.
I have no doubt that Maliki’s move was political, but the logic behind all this is fairly flawed.
Its not really that confusing if you accept the notion that the Iraqi people don’t want us there indefinitely.
No, I’ve accepted it, I was just trying to get to the loogic of pills argument.
If I understand their point, these Iraqi bloggers are saying that once the Iraqi Prime Minister became convinced that the American President was actually likely to begin withdrawing U.S. forces, Prime Minister Maliki began to conform his behavior accordingly and started to make political decisions based on what he perceived to be the likely new reality.
Which is exactly what Sen. Obama (and others) were saying would happen when they opposed the “surge.” In other words, maybe we could have gotten the exact same result many months ago while saving the lives and limbs of thousands of American G.I.’s and hundreds of thousands of American taxpayer dollars.
Sounds like Maliki would fit right into the American political machine.
Who cares what is best solution or what is the right solution. Wet your finger, hold it in the breeze, and go with the flow.
Seldom makes things right; hardly makes things better. But it does assist in keeping you personally employed for a time.
Oh, I don’t know, Tex. I mean, I’m not sure you can blame Maliki too much for that. If he can get the U.S. to send it’s own soldiers over to kill and die in order to keep the peace (somewhat) in his country, why shouldn’t he? He has probably figured that is the best solution for his government and people up to now.
And when he senses that situation really is about to change, and only then, start to act on the basis of the new reality.
Marc,
The point I am making is the same point I have made at Chen’s place on the same topic. Maliki is posturing based on his belief that Obama is going to win and remove the troops that protect the Maliki government.
If the troops are going to be removed, he can’t afford to show that as a weakness. Weakness will be taken advantage of by his own people, as well as his neighbors.
So to try and show how much he doesn’t need us, he gives off this “you can leave any time” attitude. Except he doesn’t actually say the 1 thing to actually get us to leave—which is “Leave now.” Because he knows if he did, we would.
Now I am not saying the troops should or shouldn’t be removed. That’s for another topic. I am only talking about Maliki’s mindset.
I definitely agree that Maliki is stuck in a position of appearing strong while having to deal with the political reality that the government and the army aren’t quite ready to take over…
However, there is definitely political capital in agreeing with Obama as most Iraqi’s though they see the peril and problem of being an Iraw without the US right now, still want the US out of the country. There is alot of unease in Iraq right now about the length of the US occupation and a timeline, any timeline, is what alot of Iraq’s are looking for.
I mean after a certain period of time if the US hasn’t helped fix Iraq’s problems they have become part of them… So an end date has to be in sight for all sides benefit.
You are the leader of the Iraqi government which is essentially a coalition of people that don’t get along and a majority of them want to assure an end/prevention of a longterm foreign occupation. There are degrees of difference between the groups but you get the drift. maliki must hedge his bets and assert the position of withdrawal as the best. In this case he hinted at Obama and we all know how that was spun. Speigel interview to Al Darrbagh refute to MSM debate and blogosphere blah blah blah. All this goes to the bottom of the trash bin if the operations accord is finalized.
Alfie, I think you hit the issue dead-on. Maliki is subject to so many different currents, many of them running in complete opposition to each other, that his statements may not make complete logical sense to our western ears. However, rest assured, those statements do have political meaning to them, and the Iraqi bloggers are in a better position to judge those motivations than we are.