August 29, 2007

Iranian President Supports Bush Argument on Iraq

In a surprising development, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today endorsed a key argument made by George W. Bush for maintaining the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq:

"The political power of the occupiers is collapsing rapidly," Ahmadinejad said at a news conference, referring to U.S. troops in Iraq. "Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region. Of course, we are prepared to fill the gap, with the help of neighbors and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation."

President Bush has repeatedly argued, and Democrats have just as frequently rejected the point, that if American forces were to pull out of Iraq, Iran would swoop in and try to seize control, both of a country with many sophisticated weapons systems and of the huge oil reserves in Iraq. Now, with Ahmadinejad confirming that his plans do indeed include invading and taking over Iraq as soon as the inconvenient Americans are gone, Democrats must be wondering what they did to deserve such a betrayal.

The candid admission by Ahmadinejad wrong-footed the Democrats. Ever since the counterinsurgency strategy (which they call the "surge," as if it were nothing more than a few extra troops tossed into the bucket) began producing demonstrable progress, Democratic leaders have scrambled to find a way to applaud the counterinsurgency and the troops fighting the war, while denouncing the war itself. Their current rhetorical tactic is to pretend that they had been saying all along that military victory was inevitable, and focus instead on the lack of political progress at the national level in Iraq:

For Democratic congressional leaders, the dog days of August are looking anything but quiet. Having failed twice to crack GOP opposition and force a major change in war policy, Democrats risk further alienating their restive supporters if the September showdown again ends in stalemate. House Democratic leaders held an early morning conference call yesterday with House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), honing a new message: Of course an influx of U.S. troops has improved security in Iraq, but without any progress on political reconciliation, the sweat and blood of American forces has been for naught.

Big Lizards argued in a previous post that political progress is occurring; but it's happening at levels below that of the national parliament and slowly trickling upward, rather than being mandated by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and propagating downward. But Democrats remain focused on ousting Maliki, seeing him as the weak link in Bush's argument. From the AP story that started this ruckus:

Bush and the U.S. ambassador in Iraq have given blunt assessments of political stagnation in Baghdad, and Bush has said it is up to the Iraqi people to decide if their government deserved to be replaced.

But key Democratic politicians, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, have called for al-Maliki to be replaced because his Shiite-dominated government has been unable to forge national unity....

Ousting al-Maliki, a longtime Shiite political activist, would require a majority vote in the 275-member Iraqi parliament. As long as the Kurdish parties and the main Shiite bloc back al-Maliki, his opponents lack the votes for that.

In a peculiarly cruel twist of fate, the Democratic elite finds itself unfairly disenfranchised in Iraq, unable even to vote Maliki out of office without somehow involving the pesky Iraqis.

(Ahmadinejad backstabbed his erstwhile allies even on this point: "'They rudely say (the Iraqi) prime minister and the constitution must change,' Ahmadinejad said of U.S. critics. 'Who are you? Who has given you the right' to ask for such a change, he added.")

We'll just have to wait to see the Democratic gameplan, how they'll praise Gen. David Petraeus, applaud his stunning progress in Iraq, and then call for a troop withdrawal according to a definite timetable. I doubt even the Democrats yet know how they're going to pull that one off.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 29, 2007, at the time of 3:56 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this hissing: http://biglizards.net/mt3.36/earendiltrack.cgi/2383

Comments

The following hissed in response by: David M

The above hissed in response by: David M at August 29, 2007 8:17 AM

The following hissed in response by: BarbaraS

The above hissed in response by: BarbaraS at August 30, 2007 11:05 AM

Post a comment

© 2005-2009 by Dafydd ab Hugh - All Rights Reserved