To underscore the importance
of Mr Al-Malik's role as fall guy for the great comic's routine, he was
only given 5 minutes warning to make it on stage. 

As to the great leader's
boast on electricity, the only place outside the fortified green
disneyland that's ever had an uninterrupted service was Abu Ghraib. 

But at least the Iraqi Prime
Minister wasn't subjected to the little jester's humour, like our little
rodent.

From the Guardian

Troops 'out of Iraq in two years'

Staff and agencies
Thursday June 15, 2006
A senior Iraqi official today raised the prospect that the last coalition soldiers could leave within two years, with a significant number returning home in the next six months.
Mouwafak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, said large numbers of the US-led coalition would leave by the end of this year and the "majority" by the end of 2007.
"And maybe the last soldier will leave Iraq by mid 2008," he said.
Mr Rubaie also revealed that intelligence on al-Qaida in Iraq had been recovered following last week's US air strike on a remote hideout north of Baghdad that killed the organisation's leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"We believe that this is the beginning of the end of al-Qaida in Iraq," Mr Rubaie said, adding that the documents showed al-Qaida is in "pretty bad shape" politically and in terms of training, weapons and media.

---------------

From Gus...
There is no way that US troops will be "out of Iraq" within two years, unless they are violently kicked out. The Iraq government has to recognise that for the next 25 years the number of US troop will not go much below 40,000. It will be at an average of 70,000 for the next five years if the situation improves massively. If not Iraq will have to cope with around 130,000 for most of the next 25 years. Nothing can instil peace in Iraq with the amount of damage done... Unless US troops leave now. But this would go against the wishes of the US administration which "needs" to control Iraq for the oil...

Catch 22.

Yes Gus, Mr Rubaie should get out of the "national security" business if he's naive enough to believe that the US & its monied interests are going anywhere.

But then maybe Mr Rubaie is a member of the "bushit team" & is being paid just to keep the PR dream alive?

Given that Great Britain, the US, Russia, Israel & France - not to forget us - have been lying & cheating arabs for profit for nearly a century, we're hardly likely to stop now.

Extract from Frank Rich, Karl Rove Beats the Democrats Again: 

June 18, 2006 Op-Ed Columnist

Karl Rove Beats the Democrats Again

IF theater is in your blood, you just can't resist the urge to put on a show. After the good news arrived about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, administration officials at first downplayed any prospect of a new "Mission Accomplished" to hype the victory. But that restraint didn't last a week. In sync with Barbra Streisand, who this month announced a new concert tour to cap her 1994 farewell tour, the White House gave in to its nature and revved up its own encore.

Given our government's preference for spectacle over substance, "Baghdad Surprise 2" was more meticulously planned than security for post-liberation Baghdad. The script was a montage of the administration's greatest hits.

As with the prototype of Thanksgiving 2003, there was a breathless blow-by-blow of how President Bush faked out his own cabinet, donned a baseball cap and slipped into his waiting plane. In cautious remembrance of "Top Gun," White House photos were disseminated of the fearless leader hovering in the cockpit. Once on the ground, Mr. Bush made much of looking into the eyes of Nuri al-Maliki, our third post-Saddam Iraqi leader, and finding him as worthy as he did Vladimir Putin after a similarly theatrical ocular X-ray. This bit of presidential shtick is now as polished as Johnny Carson's old burlesque psychic, Carnac the Magnificent.

But not every sequel is as satisfying as "Spider-Man 2." This time, the plot holes in the triumphal narrative were too obvious. Since Thanksgiving 2003, the number of American troops in Iraq has gone up and casualties have increased more than fivefold. With Italy and South Korea leading the bailout, the "coalition of the willing" is wilting. (Rest assured that Moldova and El Salvador are hanging in.) Iraq security is such that Mr. Bush could stay only six hours, all in the Green Zone bunker. The presidential diagnosis of Mr. Maliki's trustworthiness was contradicted by the White House decision to keep the visit a secret from him until the last minute. How big a dis is that? Even the Americans the administration distrusts most — journalists — were told a day in advance.

Polls last week showed scant movement in either the president's approval rating (37 percent in the NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey released on Wednesday night) or that of the war (53 percent deem it a mistake). On NBC Tim Russert listed Mr. Bush's woes: "Iraq, Iraq, Iraq." Americans pick Iraq as the most pressing national issue, 21 points ahead of immigration, the runner-up. They find the war so dispiriting that the networks spend less and less time covering it. Had the much-hyped Alberto roused itself from tropical storm to hurricane, Mr. Bush's Baghdad jaunt would have been bumped for the surefire Nielsen boost of tempest-tossed male anchors emoting in the great outdoors.

All of which makes it stupendously counterintuitive that the Republican campaign strategy for 2006 is to run on the war. But there was Karl Rove, freshly released from legal jeopardy, proposing exactly that in a speech just before the president's trip. In a drive-by Swift Boating, he portrayed John Kerry and John Murtha, two decorated Vietnam veterans calling for an expedited exit from Iraq, as cowards who exemplify their party's "old pattern of cutting and running."

Mr. Rove's speech was almost an exact replay of the first speech to politicize the war on terrorism — also by him and delivered just four months after 9/11. In January 2002, he said Republicans could "go to the country on this issue" because voters "trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America." Democrats howled, but with Mr. Bush's approval ratings still sky-high, the strategy was a slam dunk. The Democratic Senate majority leader then, Tom Daschle, was yoked to Saddam Hussein in a campaign attack ad. Intimidated colleagues stampeded to sign on to a hasty Iraq war resolution, exquisitely timed by the White House to come to a vote before the midterms. The Democrats lost anyway, as they would again in 2004, when Mr. Rove elevated Swift Boating to an extreme sport.

But in 2006? The war is going so badly that it's hard to imagine how the Democrats, fractious as they are, could fail, particularly if the Republicans insist on highlighting the debacle, as they did last week by staging a Congressional mud fight about Iraq on the same day that the American death toll reached 2,500. As the Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio wittily observed in April: "The good news is Democrats don't have much of a plan. The bad news is they may not need one."

Actually, though, the Democrats did have some plans, all of them now capsizing. The biggest was the hope that they could be propelled into power by their opponents' implosions. But Mr. Rove was not indicted. And the "culture of corruption" has lost its zing. Tom DeLay is gone, Duke Cunningham is in jail, and many Americans can't differentiate between Jack Abramoff, the Indian casino maven, and William Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat who kept $90,000 of very cool cash in his freezer.

On the war, Democrats are fighting among themselves or, worse, running away from it altogether. Last week the party's most prominent politician, Hillary Clinton, rejected both the president's strategy of continuing with "his open-ended commitment" in Iraq and some Democrats' strategy of setting "a date certain" for withdrawal. She was booed by some in her liberal audience who chanted, "Bring the troops home now!" But her real sin was not that she failed to endorse that option, but that she failed to endorse any option.

Like Mr. Bush, she presented a false choice — either stay the course or cut and run — yet unlike Mr. Bush, she didn't even alight on one of them. This perilous juncture demands that leaders of both parties, whether running for president or not, articulate the least-disastrous Iraq exit option that Americans and Iraqis can rally around. Time is running out. The new Brookings Institution Iraq Index cites a poll showing that 87 percent of Iraqis want a timeline for American withdrawal, and 47 percent approve of attacks on American troops. A timeline does not require, as Mrs. Clinton disingenuously implies, an arbitrary "date certain" for withdrawal.

While the Democrats dither about Iraq, you can bet that the White House will ambush them with its own election-year facsimile of an exit strategy, dangling nominal troop withdrawals as bait for voters. To sweeten the pot, it could push Donald Rumsfeld to join Mr. DeLay in retirement. Since Republicans also vilify the defense secretary's incompetence, his only remaining value to the White House is as a political pawn that Mr. Rove can pluck from the board at the most advantageous moment. October, perhaps? ...

The complete article will appear somewhere else.

‘The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked
"sensitive," that it says shows that just before President Bush left
on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat
assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a
starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi
employees." 

This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the
daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded
international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that
their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government." 

It's actually far worse than that, as the details published
below indicate, which include references to abductions, threats to women's
rights, and "ethnic cleansing."  

A PDF copy of the cable shows that it was sent to the
SecState in Washington, D.C. from "AMEmbassy Baghdad" on June 6. The
typed name at the very bottom is Khalilzad -- the name of the U.S. Ambassador,
though it is not known if this means he wrote the memo or merely approved it.  

The subject of the memo is: "Snapshots from the Office
-- Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord." 

As a footnote in one of the 23 sections, the embassy
relates, "An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive
survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi
province, as political parties and their militias are seemingly engaged in
tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq."’ 

'Wash
Post' Obtains Shocking Memo From US Embassy In Baghdad

From Al Jazeera....

....."We decided unanimously in cabinet to ban all political activities inside universities," al-Maliki told a news conference.

He said students must focus on education and leave politics to the politicians.

--------------------

Bugger... just as Gus was trying to educate himself to become a politician...