Before Maliki’s visit to Iran every western media report was saying something like this:

(LAT) Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki traveled Saturday to Iran on a mission to improve relations between the countries at a time when U.S. officials have accused Tehran of arming Shiite Muslim militia groups fighting the Americans and Iraqi security forces.

Maliki, who was expected to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today, is on his third visit to Iran since taking office in May 2006. His trip comes after fighting this spring in Baghdad and the southern city of Basra pitted Iraqi security forces against the Mahdi Army militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr.

Yet after his visit every media report says something like this:

(AFT) Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sought to reassure Iran over a planned security pact with Washington on Sunday, vowing Iraq would never be used as a platform to attack the Islamic republic.

“We will not allow Iraq to become a platform for harming the security of Iran and neighbours,” Maliki said after a late-night meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Tehran.

So what happened?

Well, it appears that Maliki went out of his way to assure the Iranians that Iraq will not be used for an attack on “to harm the Iranians and Iraq’s neighbors” (Syria). —Petty damn strange turn-around given his visits’ intention was to relate Iraq’s own security concerns!

Of course, this is not really all that unusual given the Iraqi and Iranian history, their commercial, economic, political and even military inroads developing over the past few years. (Many of the elite (doctors, politicians, clergy) of Iraq speak fluent Persian.) But you’d never know it from listening to the Bush administration’s talking points, for that matter the echo chamber of the mainstream media. The reality is, aside from their heritage, religion, languages, customs, and having lots of oil, there’s an Iraqi faction, backed by Iran, in the Iraqi government: Hakim’s SIIC; it’s a dominate player in the Iraqi government and a right arm for Maliki in Parliament! The irony here is, using this Iranian metric, Sadr is far less likely to prone to Iranian influence. You’ll certainly never hear this from Bush.

So now you know why it happened–why Maliki said what he said.

Therefore, for the Iraq ‘pro-occupationist’ in this crowd, we have here another ‘pecking order’ story coming out of “Iraq” that should be of some interest: Bush’s version of national security, American interests pertaining to Iran and Syria, just got dumped on (—double-dumped on if you add the goal of Maliki’s visit was to express concern over Iranian weapons in Iraq).

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Looks like someone upturned Arthurstone’s rock again.

These poor Leftists.

Reality has intruded on their fantasy world and the only things they have left to cling to are their worn out memes and tired, tattered hopes of an American defeat.

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[...] that expires in Dec 2008. This, of course, has commenter Doug in an apocalyptic tizzy in the “lull in Iraq news” thread, anticipating doom with each leak of yet another 2nd hand, hearsay detail on the undrafted [...]

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What gall..

Dag gum, Doug… we agree on somthing! It is chutzpah. And it’s just something we’ll have to work out with them. If not, then Iraq is on their own by choice and necessity for lack of agreement. That will be, in effect, them asking us to leave. And if they do that, I’m kewl.

Arthurstone? Ho hum. Your cherry picked excerpts of statements have no bearing on the progress made because of the surge, opposed vehemently by the Congressional DNC losers.

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Mata Harley typed:

Go back prior to the surge and read the emphatic declarations of premature failure by media and Congress alike.

Oh them media. And that dadgum Congress.

Why can’t they publish the good news? Why can’t they continue to take dictation like in the good old days?

Wolfowitz from 2004:

“There’s a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money. We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” Wolfowitz also told Congress “oil revenues of Iraq could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

Cheney from 2002:

Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on CNN’s American Morning, says: “I think that the people of Iraq would welcome the US force as liberators; they would not see us as oppressors, by any means.”

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Scott,

The Iraqi government just told us we need to report to them any troop movements before they are made. I would have thought that any hawkishly inclined pro-iraqi occupationalist would be so outraged that they would be having an out of body experience from their own anger. Is it not bad enough that Iraq can’t get their act together with their two-bit government, that we had to scrap the benchmarks, can’t get an oil agreement, revenue sharing, constitutional review, can’t get a SOFA agreement, and now …now they are dictating what the United States military can and cannot do in their country. What gall, huh???

These moguls, that vacation in Iran, who run this U.S. puppet stand have actually decreed they want the U.S. military to report to the Iraqi government any troop movements before they are made.

Where are the conservatives on this??? Consider this: This Iraqi government is infiltrated with all kinds of radicals who can’t stand the US; hence, don’t you think the idea of letting Iraq dictate U.S. troop movements is a prescription for disaster?

If the United States agrees to such an “order” from the Iraqi government, don’t you believe it would put our men and women in harms way, or at the least, compromising positions?

So here’s a story, a big one, yet all I hear are crickets in the conservative media and blogs, as I have for a couple of weeks. If there’s any media lull, you guys are participants in it, too.

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I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here Doug. Is it that there is no lull in American coverage as the Washington Post claims? Is it that there is no lull in the war in Iraq despite the record low in casualties last month? Is it that you agree with General Petraeus that the change in strategy which brought about this lull has made it possible to consider withdrawing even more troops?

Or is it something else? I mean, if you’re trying to say that the war is lost, and that as a result American forces should head for the border tomorrow…I think you might be off message in out of touch with the most recent reporting (what little of it there has been in the msm).

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(Reuters) Iraq said on Friday it would not grant U.S. troops freedom of movement for military operations in a new agreement being negotiated on extending the presence of American troops on its soil.

Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said the United States wanted its forces to operate with no restrictions, but this was not acceptable to Iraq.
…
While the Iraqi government has confirmed there are major differences between the two sides in the negotiations, few details of the sticking points have been made public.

“What I can confirm now, with no hesitation, is that there will not be freedom of movement for American (forces) in Iraq,” Salih told Arabiya television.

U.S. officials said this week they would not comment on the content of the negotiations.

But Western diplomats say it is unlikely the Americans would agree to any deal that would require them to seek permission from the Iraqi government for every military operation.

“If we reach an agreement … any American military movements should be in the framework of Iraqi approval and decisions and through consultations with the Iraqi side,” Salih said.
…
Salih said the United States had asked Baghdad to maintain the U.S. military’s current status, which does not require a green light from the Iraqi government for military operations.

“The U.S. side asked to extend the existing status and the Iraqi side didn’t see any use of that,” he said.

The Iraqi government’s room to manoeuvre may be limited, however, by its dependence on U.S. firepower to secure its borders and tackle armed groups that defy its authority.

While U.S. officials say the Iraqi army’s capabilities have improved in recent months, it is still dependent on the U.S. military for logistical and aerial support. Iraqi security forces control only half of Iraq’s 18 provinces.

Thousands of Iraqis protested in Baghdad’s Sadr City, Sadr’s main stronghold, and the southern holy Shi’ite cities of Kerbala and Najaf on Friday against the negotiations. Some protesters carried placards rejecting “permanent occupation”.

U.S. and Iraqi officials are also negotiating a strategic framework agreement that defines long-term bilateral ties.

In Washington, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators complained to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates over what they said was a lack of consultation over the long-term agreement with Iraq.

In a letter to Rice and Gates, the four senators said Iraq had proposed “significant changes” to the agreements and the Bush administration had not followed through on its commitment to consult with Congress about these changes.

The letter was signed by senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and John Kerry of Massachusetts as well as Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

This is the priceless nugget from all that:

“What I can confirm now, with no hesitation, is that there
will not be freedom of movement for American (forces) in Iraq,”
[the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq] Salih told Arabiya television.

While he may or may not be the high stakes political bargainer of all time, who really knows. But it’s so damn ballsy to say it on the pro-American Arabiya tv news.

Yes, no ‘lull’ here.

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The interesting bit to all this is that in 3-6wks, Gen Petraeus is likely to announce a resumption of troop withdrawals due to the security gains brought about by The Surge.

People-not specifically Doug-need to close their eyes to party lines and party rhetoric, and look at
-how both sides have been wrong
-how both sides have been right
-how some elements of history are a loss/lead scenario where a success can’t be had without a preceeding, hard pill to swallow
-how planet Earth will not become civilized by charisma, but by bargaining power, and to that end how efforts to promote defeat in and of themselves defeat the effort to bargain and bring about change via peace. For example, the weeks before the invasion, millions of people around the world protested against the invasion. Saddam told his interrogators as did his senior advisors that this emboldened him. How might history have changed if those millions had taken to the streets not in protest of the liberators, but in protest of the tyrant?

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Doug, we could argue all day point to point on items. But you just hit the nail on the head in your last post. “Well that’s how we differ”…. on the whole perspective, the whole enchilada.

You delight in Monday morning quarterbacking, and somehow demand a perfect administration and a perfectly executed war. You cite statistics on individual battles and negotiations, and never consider the intent or the herculean efforts made, nor the overall result of the combination of battles.

War is started, waged and ended by humans… an imperfect entity. Add government bureaucrats to the mix and you really lower the possibilities of flawless performance. If you set your demands to an impossible level, you will reap nothing but disappointment and failure in your life because of an unachievable threshhold. The path to the pot of gold is fraught with left, right and u-turns… not to mention speedbumps, pot holes, traffic lights, and collisions.

I see and acknowledge failures – even those you mention. But unlike you, I don’t expect perfection – not from mankind, and especially not from government and leaders. Instead I keep my eyes on the goal post. As long as it’s still in view, and the teams haven’t stormed off the field to quit, there is the chance to score. I am quite used to keeping my nose to the grindstone, and even more used to obstacles that crop up along the way.

The never, coulda, shoulda you constantly preach is immaterial – since the past cannot be altered. Your “off the cuff… as I see it” predictions of the future, and your play by play, is just as immaterial. It’s exhausting that you race out to find every piece of mediocre media to support your (and their’s) premature rush to failure on any particular issue. Small wonder this nation is filled with negative victim mentalities. It saturates, permeates and soils our every waking minute.

This pattern by too many is getting old, and is a game I don’t wish to play. I’m content to wait it out – just as we did with the surge – for actual results. In short, I choose not to use you and the media as my tarot card reader.

You, AP, Reuters, The Nation, NYT, WaPo and ilk take quasi-news (ala hearsay from somebody with an opinion to some reporter somewhere, who also has an opinion) and spin their version of the future to your shared apocalyptic visions. Yet how’s your track record?

Go back prior to the surge and read the emphatic declarations of premature failure by media and Congress alike. Remember how many have said the Iraqis will not succeed, or that they do not want a free Arab Democracy. Recollect how many said Basra would not change from Sadr mafia rule. Remember the civil war that the Iraqis have not allowed to happen, nor to dampen their quest to hold on to this elected government. Remember how many have said we and the Iraqis cannot beat AQ in that country.

Criticize the past, and damn the future all you like. This does not make you correct in your views. And if your demand for perfection and outlook, sans roses, is this way in your personal life, it must be very difficult on those that surround you. You do laugh and have positive thoughts, yes? You seem an intelligent, if not negative, type of guy. I just can’t believe your droning negativity is the only aspect of your hopes for the world.

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