Maliki: `We don't need the US anymore'

Iraqi PM al-Maliki and one of his top aides decided to express a little gratitude to the US for liberating them yesterday.

Al-Maliki made a point of saying that his government was doing just fine thanks, and American troops can leave "any time they want."

Meanwhile, the real grenades came from Maliki's top aide, one of the Shiite apparatchniks named Hassan al-Suneid. He spoke to the AP and said that the US was treating Iraq `like an experiment in a lab'. He also criticized the Americans using Sunni tribes in Anabar and Anbar and Diyala provinces to help fight al-Qaeda. "These are gangs of killers," he said.

Of course, they're also Sunnis.

In addition, he said that al-Maliki has problems with the top U.S. commander, General David Petraeus, who he said works along a "purely American vision", accusing the US military of `human rights violations' and trashing General Petraeus for cracking down on the Shiite death squads and making raids into Sadr City to keep Moqtada al-Sadr's boys in line.

In case you're wondering, this line comes directly out of Tehran. The Iranians watch CNN and read the New York Times and know all about the defeatism here at home and the efforts of Congress to short circuit General Petraeus' efforts. This is their way of getting Maliki to help put the boot in at an opportune time.

It pays to remember that al-Maliki and most of the corrupt Shiite cadre that the Bush Administration allowed to take power spent the Saddam years cuddled up with our enemies in Iran.

Well, guess what Bubba? Of course General Petraeus has a `purely American vision! The US went into Iraq for our own purposes,and liberating you from Saddam's rape rooms, mass graves and torture chambers was just a nice side benefit. Since we're mentioning it, had the president opted for SecDef Donald Rumfeld's plan for a punitive strike instead of Colin Powell and George Tennant's vision of occupation, regime change and the poster child for Arab democracy, there would be a lot more dead Iraqis and a lot less dead Americans, Brits, Ozzies, Poles, etc. And you have the nerve to talk about `human rights violations'?

This is typically what happens when one deals with the Arab World on a `hearts and minds' basis. They see you as weak. Generally, the Arabs understand strength, rigid order and clear rules and limits - just ask the Ottomans, who ruled them for five centuries with hardly any trouble, while bleeding them white with taxes and treating them rather more harshly than blacks in the old Jim Crow south.

Of course, there's a solution to the problems with the current Iraqi government. As my pals Omar and Mohammed from Iraq The Model suggested once, we could give the Kurds their independence, depose this rotten government and set up a military governor with absolute power over the rest of Iraq until the Iraqis learned to rule themselves democratically without tribalim and Islam trumping everything.

That won't happen of course...it runs too counter to the president's `Arab democracy' fantasy. But hopefully we've learned something if there's a next time,and we won't be pushing people with no democratic traditions into elections they're not prepared for, just to play politics.

In Japan, it was four years until we allowed the Japanese to run their own affairs, and, as in Germany, we made sure that the first elections were won by US friendly politicians and not by people associated with our enemies.