In another shocking development, it appears Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is full of it. Here’s what she said yesterday regarding President Bush’s plan to ramp up the conflict in Iraq (emphasis added):
And I said that I thought it was important to have the Maliki government have a little time now to make its plan work. After all, this is the Maliki government’s plan. They came to the President with this plan in Amman. They said, we need to put together a plan that will help us to deal with the problem that our population doesn’t believe that we can secure them.
Contrast with today’s New York Times:
Iraq’s Shiite-led government offered only a grudging endorsement on Thursday of President Bush’s proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in an effort to curb sectarian violence and regain control of Baghdad. The tepid response immediately raised questions about whether the government would make a good-faith effort to prosecute the new war plan.
. . .
While senior officials in Washington have presented the new war plan as an American adaptation of proposals that were first put to Mr. Bush by Mr. Maliki when the two men met in the Jordanian capital of Amman in November, the picture that is emerging in Baghdad is quite different. What Mr. Maliki wanted, his officials say, was in at least one crucial respect the opposite of what Mr. Bush decided: a lowering of the American profile in the war, not the increase Mr. Bush has ordered.
It’s very surprising that what we hear from Washington is at odds with what’s going on in Iraq. That’s a new development. Anyway, this is a good set up for the blame game when if this surge fails to turn things around. The Iraqis failed to deliver on “their” plan.