Saudi Arabia Assesses Shiite rule to giving Iraq to Iran on a "golden platter."

Again I ask, how could a PFC have access to so much secret data (250,000 and counting)?

What does "SECRET" mean? Much of what comes out seems so obvious and so not news but fascinating in a voyeuristic way. We now have more about Iraq and what those in the Middle East really think about a new Shiite power center next to Iran.

Today's Wikileak peek into US diplomacy shows the reality of the unintended consequences of our ill-conceived and ill-prepared mission in Iraq, a mission that was to be paid for by Iraqi oil but fell a trillion dollars or so short.

The same people that thought Iraq was a good idea are the same that created or supervised a system of security for US secret cables.

It has become obvious that a lot of people that confided with the US, people whose cooperation was needed by the US are now embarrassed or in trouble because of these revelations.

Why would anyone in their right mind, domestic or foreign, trust anything the US Government says or does?

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Analysts: Cables between Sunnis, U.S. diplomats might push Iraq closer to Iran


By Leila Fadel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 2, 2010; 7:35 PM

BAGHDAD - Private conversations between Sunni Arab leaders in the Middle East and U.S. diplomats, leaked in confidential State Department documents this week, may push Iraq's future Shiite-led government closer to Iran, analysts said.

The nation is already divided along sectarian lines and since the U.S. invasion in 2003 Iraq has become the center of a regional power struggle between Shiite Iran to the east and Arab Sunni neighbors to the west - a struggle that played out during Iraq's parliamentary elections in March.

The first few hundred cables leaked by the WikiLeaks Web site could further damage Shiite incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's weak relationship with Arab neighbors, countries the United States had hoped would counter Iran's influence in Iraq as U.S. influence here wanes and the U.S. military prepares for a scheduled exit at the end of 2011.

The cables show candid moments over the past two years in which, among other things, the king of Saudi Arabia called Maliki an "Iranian agent" and a "liar." Meanwhile, Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, advocated a military coup in Iraq and said that the United States should "forget democracy" there and that the country should have "a dictator."

Sunni Arab hostility toward the growing Shiite power in Iraq is no revelation. But the sensitive cables are coming out just as the recently reappointed Maliki is cobbling together a cabinet that may finally lead to a government.

"Sunni Arab dislike of a Shiite ascendancy in Iraq is well known by Maliki. But this will exacerbate the problem and may push him closer to the Iranians," said Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2007 to 2009. "Tehran will certainly try. We'll see if there are any Arab overture to the new government once it is formed - that would help, but I doubt it."

Iraqi officials were quick to dismiss the likelihood of lasting effects, pointing out this was more of a problem between Iran and the Arab Gulf than a problem for Iraq. A new era of Shiite Arab majority leadership was forged in Iraq following the invasion, after decades of dictatorship under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab who oppressed the Shiite majority and the Kurds. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia likened the Shiite rule to giving Iraq to Iran on a "golden platter."

"These are not secrets. We know this," said Sami al-Askari, a Shiite legislator close to Maliki. "I think it has no effect at all. With Saudi Arabia, our relationship is not good, and with Egypt our relations are not that good. It's more an embarrassment for the American establishment. How can these secret documents get out? It's shaking the entire American system."

Maliki bitch-slaps Hollerin Joe Biden

The Contemplative Joe Biden

Obama needs to do a Rev Wright on old Joe and get his embarrassing dumb ass over to the Naval Observatory and let him attend to his roses. It is is just a matter of time before Obama will tire of having to pick up after the irrepressible Biden. There simply is no known verbal remedy of kaopectate  that could ever plug him up. Maliki noticed.

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Iraq's Maliki says Biden criticism "out of date"
Tue Feb 10, 2009
By Waleed Ibrahim

BAGHDAD, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki took issue with the new U.S. administration on Tuesday, calling Vice President Joe Biden's criticism of the slow pace of reform in Iraq "out of date".

Before leaving Washington last week to deliver a major foreign policy speech in Germany, Biden chided Baghdad for failing to settle disputes over the city of Kirkuk and to enact a law dividing oil revenue, among other issues.

"I think our administration is going to have to be very deeply involved. We are going to have to get in there and be much more aggressive in forcing them to deal with these issues," Biden said.

Asked about Biden's remarks on Tuesday, Maliki, an increasingly assertive leader whose followers won surprise victories in provincial elections last month, fired back.

"I believe talk about applying pressure on the Iraqi government or taking hard measures against it no longer works," he said at a news conference in Baghdad with visiting French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

You get the picture but do read on..

Maliki to Clinton and Levin: 'Come to your senses...respect democracy.'

Maliki returns fire at US critics
BBC

Nouri Maliki said the US politicians should "come to their senses"
Iraq's prime minister has hit back at senior US politicians who have called for him to be removed from office.
Nouri Maliki singled out senators Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin.

He said the Democratic senators were acting as if Iraq was "their property" and that they should "come to their senses" and "respect democracy".

Analysts say Mr Maliki is fighting to hold his government together. His words come days before a report to Congress on the US Iraq "surge" strategy.

The BBC's Mike Wooldridge, in Baghdad, says the already heated political situation inside and outside Iraq has now got even hotter.


Leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin have not experienced in their political lives the kind of differences we have in Iraq
PM Nouri Maliki

Mr Maliki has just taken part in several meetings with other political leaders in Iraq.

Afterwards, he indicated that Sunni Vice-President Tariq al Hashemi's Iraqi Islamic Party was about to join forces with the four Shia and Kurdish parties who recent established a new moderate alliance, with a joint statement imminent.

The almost total Sunni Arab withdrawal from and boycott of the cabinet at present has been at the centre of the embattled prime minister's difficulties, our correspondent says.

But senior Iraqi Islamic Party member Omar Abdul Sattar later told the BBC Mr Maliki had no right to speak on behalf of the party and there were no plans to join the new alliance.

'Undiplomatic'

Earlier this month, Senators Clinton and Levin both urged Iraqi politicians to choose someone else to lead Iraq's ruling coalition and seek faster national reconciliation.


A report about the military "surge" in Iraq is due in September

"I share Senator Levin's hope that the Iraqi parliament will replace Prime Minister Maliki with a less divisive and more unifying figure when it returns in a few weeks," Sen Clinton said in a statement on 22 August.

But the Iraqi prime minister hit back during a news conference in Baghdad, saying: "Leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin have not experienced in their political lives the kind of differences we have in Iraq.

"When they give their judgment they have no knowledge of what reconciliation means."

He also rebuffed French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner who, in an interview with a US news magazine, apparently also suggested Mr Maliki step down.

"... we were surprised that the minister made a statement which can't be called in any way diplomacy, when he called for replacing the government," Mr Maliki said.

The introduction of some 30,000 US troops - the "surge" strategy - was supposed to buy time for the Iraqi government to make political progress.

But, our correspondents say, far from making progress, Mr Maliki's government is visibly falling apart.

US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and US ambassador Ryan Crocker are soon expected to report to the US Congress on progress in Iraq since the surge began.

Mr Maliki said a negative report by Gen Petraeus would not cause him to change course, but he expected the general to "be supportive of the government".

A swerve in the surge. Al-Maliki says wall will stoke Sunni-Shiite tensions.

Iraqi PM orders halt to Baghdad barrier

Qassim Abdul-Zahra, The Associated press; with files from The Los Angeles Times
Published: Monday, April 23, 2007

CAIRO, Egypt - Iraq's prime minister yesterday ordered a halt to the U.S. military's construction of a barrier separating a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shia areas in Baghdad after criticism over the project at home.
The challenge to the U.S. initiative came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki began a regional tour to shore up support from mostly Sunni Arab nations for his Shia-dominated government as sectarian violence persists despite a nearly 10-week-old security crackdown.

The U.S. military announced last week that it was building a five-kilometre-long, 3.5-metre-tall concrete wall in Azamiyah, a Sunni stronghold in northern Baghdad whose residents have often been the victims of retaliatory mortar attacks by Shia militants following bombings usually blamed on Sunni insurgents.

U.S. and Iraqi officials defended plans for the barrier as an effort to protect the neighbourhood, but residents and Sunni leaders complained it was a form of discrimination that would isolate the community. A large protest was scheduled for today in the area.

In his first public comments on the issue, Mr. al-Maliki said yesterday that he had ordered the construction to stop.

"I oppose the building of the wall and its construction will stop," he said during a joint news conference with the secretary-general of the Arab League in Cairo. "There are other methods to protect neighbourhoods, but I should point out that the goal was not to separate, but to protect."
He did not elaborate, but added "this wall reminds us of other walls that we reject, so I've ordered it to stop and to find other means of protection for the neighbourhoods." He wasn't more specific, but apparently was referring to the Berlin Wall during the Cold War and Israel's construction of a barrier in the West Bank to keep out suicide bombers.

U.S. military spokesman Lt.-Col. Christopher Garver declined to comment on whether construction of the wall would stop, saying only that all security measures were constantly under discussion.

Sectarian bloodshed continued in Iraq yesterday, with at least 72 people killed or found dead.

In the most unsettling incident, a forbidden love affair that ended with a young woman's death by stoning led to more religiously motivated killings when gunmen dragged members of a tiny religious minority off a bus and killed 23 of them, police and witnesses said.

The incident in the northern city of Mosul was shocking in its brutality and frightening for the spectre it raised -- violence between Muslims and non-Muslims aggravating the already volatile conflict involving Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds.
The victims were Yazidis, a sect that is neither Christian nor Muslim and whose followers have faced persecution from a succession of rulers.