MISTER CREDIBLE SAYS THE IRAQI CIVIL WAR HAS BEEN PREVENTED

I guess Bush is going to let Maliki keep his gig in the Greed Zone. He's reading a GOP script while he's in NYC this week making believe he represents a soverign nation-- albeit one that can't even kick a vicious, murdering mercenary force out of it's jurisdiction. Yesterday's Washington Post mercifully buried the big news-- that according to Maliki "civil war has been averted in Iraq and Iranian intervention there has 'ceased to exist'"-- on page 15.

"I can't say there is a picture of roses and flowers in Iraq," Maliki told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "However, I can say that the greatest victory, of which I am proud . . . is stopping the explosion of a sectarian war." That possibility, he said, "is now far away."

While political reconciliation is not yet complete, he said, progress is being made. "Reconciliation is not a decision that can be made, but a process that takes continuous efforts and also needs strategic patience," Maliki said.

He said cabinet ministers who have left his government in protest will be replaced, and he expressed confidence that the Iraqi parliament will pass legislation that he, the Bush administration and Congress have demanded.

Maliki, who will speak to the U.N. General Assembly tomorrow, deftly dodged questions about last week's incident in which employees of Blackwater, a private U.S. security firm, allegedly killed 11 Iraqi civilians. While "initial signs" are that "there was some wrongdoing from Blackwater," he said, he will await the results of a U.S.-Iraqi investigation. He dismissed a statement by the interior minister in Baghdad that Blackwater will be banned from Iraq, saying the positions of the ministry and his office are "the same."

Iraqi security forces, Maliki said, are increasingly capable of operating without U.S. support. But he agreed with the Bush administration that an early U.S. withdrawal would be unwise.

Good boy gets to keep his job. But, alas, those spoil-sports and MoveOn bargain-rate givers in New York ruined the whole scenario this morning with more of their damn liberal doom'n'gloom.

Sunni Arab extremists have begun a systematic campaign to assassinate police chiefs, police officers, other Interior Ministry officials and tribal leaders throughout Iraq, staging at least 10 attacks in 48 hours.

...The latest outbreak of violence closely follows the concerted efforts of President Bush and Gen. David H. Petraeus to portray the American troop “surge” as having succeeded in bringing more stability to Iraq. Iraqi officials said Tuesday that the attacks might well have been intended to blunt that message.

...In the recent violence, several of the attackers were suicide bombers-- a signature of Sunni Arab extremists-- either driving cars or wearing suicide vests.

The most lethal attack was on Monday evening in Baquba, when a man wearing a suicide vest walked into a reconciliation meeting at a Shiite mosque in Shifta, a suburb of the provincial capital, and exploded his device as several hundred people drank tea after breaking the daylong Ramadan fast, according to an American military report.

The police chief, Brig. Ali Dlyan, was killed along with 11 other police officers, two of whom were senior commanders. There were differing accounts of the death toll, with the American military saying that 24 died and 37 were wounded and Diyala health officials saying they had received 18 bodies. The Baquba hospital reported receiving 27 with wounds.

The governor of Diyala Province, who was wounded in the attack, was saved from death by his bodyguards, who saw the bomber going toward the governor and threw themselves on top of him. All five of his bodyguards died and the governor had to be dragged from underneath them, said a provincial official in Diyala who rushed to the scene to help with the rescue. He requested anonymity for fear of becoming a target.

I wonder if Maliki has decided to endorse one of the pathetic pygmies™.