By Tom Engelhardt --TomDispatch
Oct. 27, 2006 -- Are we now officially out of our minds? On Tuesday, General George W. Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to Iraq, gave a joint press conference in Baghdad that was all for home
consumption. By home, I mean Washington DC. I mean Indiana. I
mean Texas. Baghdad's Green Zone was essentially a stage set for
a political defense of the Bush presidency.
If the news hadn't been quite so grim, this tandem's act might have qualified as an Abbott and Costello comedy routine, including the moment when the lights went out -- while "gunfire and bomb blasts echoed
around the city" -- thanks to our inability to resuscitate Iraqi
electricity production. In fact,
the New York Times just reported that, on some projects,
more than 50 percent of U.S. reconstruction dollars are being spent on
"overhead" as, for months at a time, whole reconstruction teams
sit idly with the meter going waiting to begin work.
Some Democratic critics had been calling on the Bush administration for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Well, a timetable they got (though Ambassador Khalilzad preferred to call it a "timeline"). The catch was: The hopeless, essentially powerless Iraqi "government" inside Baghdad's Green Zone was to deliver that timeline as a pre-election present to a disgruntled American public. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself would produce it with genuine "benchmarks" for upping oil production and splitting oil revenues, for disarming and dismantling Shiite militias and police death squads, and for negotiating with Sunni rebels.
Not only that, Maliki would have his "plan" in place (perhaps for the Iraqis to withdraw from their own country) "before the end of the year" -- and this was just one of a welter of mini-schedules offered by the ambassador and general that would shove Iraqi matters at least beyond November 7th, if not into the relatively distant future. The ambassador, for instance, assured Americans that all those benchmarks would be met and "significant progress" achieved "in the course of the next twelve months" -- the slight catch being: "assuming that the Iraqi leaders deliver on the commitments that they have made."
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