Bush and Maliki Eventually Meet to Achieve Little

Someone in Washington didn’t read “Summits for Dummies.” Yesterday’s meeting among host King Abdullah of Jordan, Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq and America’s President Bush didn’t get off to much of a start. After an unflattering memo from US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley about Mr. Maliki was leaked, the social dinner to have occurred on Wednesday was cancelled. A working session yesterday amounted to little more than a photo op. Of the three, only His Majesty is likely to keep his job beyond 2009, and the inability of the participants to make any headway in Iraq’s Civil War is the reason why.

Summitry is a special kind of diplomacy. When the top guys meet, delaying tactics don’t hold up. “I must confer with my government” doesn’t work if one is the head of government. So summits that produce no agreements are deemed failures, with all the bad press that goes with it. So serious has this become that there is a term for the diplomats who pave the way for their bosses to succeed at the summit – “sherpa,” just like Tenzing who helped Sir Edmund Hillary to the top of Everest.

The meeting in Amman seemed set up as an anti-summit. No agreement had been arranged in advance (such as a SALT treaty between the US and USSR), and neither the president nor the prime minister can count on his legislature to ratify anything that they may have agreed. In the US, the Democrats control both houses, and in Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr’s band of legislators and ministers suspended participation in the government Mr. Maliki heads in protest of the meeting even occurring. Moreover, the summit couldn’t be held in Baghdad because of bad security, nor in Washington for fear that the government would fall in Mr. Maliki’s absence.

President Bush said, “Part of the prime minister’s frustrations is that he doesn’t have the tools necessary to take care of those who break the law.” He added, “We talked today about accelerating authority to the prime minister so he can do what the Iraqi people expect him to do. We agreed on the importance of speeding up the training of Iraq security forces.” Thus far, 500,000 Iraqis have received such training, and the militias that are fighting the civil war there have heavily infiltrated the police, which means Mr. Maliki doesn’t have the tools. Speeding up training, though, only cranks out more militia sympathizers with combat training. This is not what either man needs.

Yet, Mr. Bush said of the PM, “He’s the right guy for Iraq.” And to keep him in office, the US troops in Iraq will stay “until the job is complete.” Meanwhile, Mr. Maliki said, “There is no problem” in his relations with the White House. It seems the Green Zone government he heads will fight to the last American. Moqtada al-Sadr is now that much closer to being Iraq’s Ayatollah Khomeini.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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