World-News

By Philip Sherwell

The gulf's two military powers, Sunni-Muslim Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, are lining up behind their warring religious brethren in Iraq in a potentially explosive showdown, as expectations grow in both countries that America is preparing a pull-out of its troops.

https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15797.htm

BY Eric S. Margolis

Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Al Maliki, governs only over Baghdad’s US-protected Green Zone. The US controls what passes for Iraq’s police and armed forces. Maliki has no army of his own; his Shia supporters are divided and feuding. How can Bush expect a powerless prime minister to do what the mighty US cannot?

https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15804.htm



https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Maliki
https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Margolis

https://www.ufppc.org/content/view/5362/


Informant: jensenmk

From ufpj-news



https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Redress

With the Iraq Study Group report due on Wednesday, the Bush administration has notified allies that it will not budge on certain aspects of Iraq policy, whatever recommendations are put forth by the independent panel of 10 prominent Republicans and Democrats.

https://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120206D.shtml



https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Iraq+Study+Group

The Iraqi government is in danger of being brought down by the wholesale smuggling of the nation's oil and other forms of corruption that together represent a "second insurgency", according to a senior US official. Stuart Bowen, who has been in charge of auditing Iraq's faltering reconstruction since 2004, said corruption had reached such levels that it threatened the survival of the state.

https://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120206Z.shtml

By Robert Fisk

More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia - and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself - as he apparently did in Amman yesterday - that the United States will stay in Iraq "until the job is complete"?

https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15788.htm



https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=until+the+job
https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Robert+Fisk

https://www.kucinich.us/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=34787#34787


Informant: John Calvert

The editors of the New York Times write: "President Bush's news conference yesterday with Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq had an even greater than usual sense of unreality about it, with Mr. Bush insisting that Mr. Maliki is 'the right guy for Iraq' and that American troops will stay 'until the job is complete,' while Mr. Maliki asserted that his country is a democracy and he is not a captive of Shiite militias."

https://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120106L.shtml



Talks on Iraq Produce No Major Shift

President Bush and Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, met yesterday for the first time since sectarian killings in Iraq surged to record levels, but offered no new blueprint for quelling the chaos, thwarting the hopes of those pushing for a dramatic shift in US policy.

https://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120106M.shtml

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Bush is irrelevant

The Price of Liberty
by Michael Gaddy

12/06

President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki met in Jordan to discuss the steadily deteriorating situation in Iraq; neither has faced the reality that as far as controlling future events in Iraq are concerned, both are irrelevant. Bush, like many other factional leaders in Iraq, has his own militia, arguably no longer the largest, but is in the unenviable position of being the one all the others see as occupiers and targets of opportunity. Prime Minister al-Maliki has nothing but his status as a puppet for the most hated entity currently involved in the debacle that is Iraq. In reality, Bush lost whatever control of events he had in Iraq somewhere between 'Mission Accomplished' and 'Bring Them On'...

https://www.thepriceofliberty.org/06/12/11/gaddy.htm



https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Maliki

Orange County Register
by staff

11/30/06

Semantics aside, nearly two dozen militias roam Baghdad, and the government is impotent As one expert put it to us Wednesday, the postponed meeting between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is 'like dancing on the decks of the Titanic as the ship is going down.' If Larry Diamond, a scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who worked in Iraq as an official of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was exaggerating, it wasn't by much. ... And if the real events are uncertain and indicate instability, consider the lack of agreement regarding the words being used to describe them. The administration has termed 'terrorists' what others call 'insurgents.' Some major news outlets are calling the chaos and violence afflicting Iraq today a 'civil war,' while the president says not so...

https://tinyurl.com/yfjxjz


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp