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`Right guy'?

The world has been well aware for a while that President George Bush is in a state of denial when it comes to dealing with the reality of Iraq. Mr. Bush now appears to have outdone himself in making bizarre pronouncements when he claimed that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is the "right guy" for the task of restoring stability. Less than a day before the United States President made this remark, his National Security Council (NSC) came out with an assessment to the opposite effect. According to this memo, ground conditions in Baghdad suggested that "Mr. Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action." The NSC was of course clever enough to anticipate its boss's wishes since it focussed on measures that could be taken to strengthen the Iraqi leader while making recommendations. The leak of this memo to The New York Times appears also to have been a pre-emptive strike against the Departments of States and Defence and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which are likely to come up with different policy reviews over the next few days. The Council's memo recommends many of the steps the other study papers are expected to prescribe. None of these review papers proposes the complete withdrawal of the U.S.-led occupation force in Iraq although that will be the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances.

If the NSC's memo is indicative of what lies ahead, the Bush administration appears to be thinking of little more than changing the deployment patterns of the occupation force. A consensus seems to be developing around the notion of embedding a large percentage of the foreign troops within Iraqi military and police units. Any such move will of course render meaningless a parallel proposal that the Maliki government should be given greater control of its own security agencies. It is not clear whether the other teams reviewing Iraq policy will back the Council's outlandish recommendations in respect of political changes. The idea is to create a new parliamentary majority consisting of secular and moderate politicians that will prop up Mr. Maliki, making him independent of the Shia parties that put him in power. None but the deluded would believe that a person who has been active in sectarian politics for almost three decades would be able to cross over easily to an artificial grouping put together with American financial and political support. As this random sample of proposals under consideration suggests, Team Bush appears to be completely clueless about what to do about Iraq.

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