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The problem isn't Maliki

Notwithstanding the White House trying to put a positive spin on things in Iraq, seeking to shift blame onto Iraqi PM al-Maliki and Osama bin Laden, etc. etc. there seems little doubt that Iraq is an unholy mess on just about every conceivable level.

The IHT has an incisive and spot-on Opinion piece putting the entire Iraq fiasco into context:

"Blaming the prime minister of Iraq, rather than the president of the United States, for the failure of U.S. policy, is cynical politics, pure and simple. It is neither fair nor helpful in figuring out how to end America's biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has been catastrophic for Iraq ever since he took over from the equally disastrous Ibrahim al-Jaafari more than a year ago. America helped engineer Jaafari's removal, only to get Maliki. That tells you something important about whether this is more than a matter of personalities. Jaafari, as it happens, was Iraq's first democratically chosen leader under the U.S.-sponsored Constitution."

Read the full piece, "The problem isn't Maliki" here.

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