1115.org

It can be awkward if the wrong people buy into it. Or decide to embarrass you by pretending to.

Especially if it happens one week before a critical election in which you have your back to the wall, and are in danger of suffering a fate worse than death.

From time to time, all the leading lights of the Bush regime have piously intoned the ritualistic claptrap about how Iraq is, of course, a sovereign nation and we are but their honored guests.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has obviously decided to have some fun with that.

Last week he flatly contradicted the big pronouncement, jointly made by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and General George Casey with no ulterior motives whatsoever, that the Iraqi government had committed itself to a timeline for making hard political decisions, and benchmarks.

And today, with a perfectly straight face, he issued orders to the U.S. military in Iraq:

Iraq’s prime minister has ordered the lifting of all US and Iraqi military checkpoints around the Shia stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad.

Who would have thought the old guy had it in him? Certainly not the Bush-men, that’s for sure. It is very evident that it has never even occurred to the folks who preside over things in Iraq for us that anything like this might ever happen. They have no standard operating procedure to deal with it. Their initial PR response to the Prime Minister’s order:

A US military spokesman said that he was not aware of the order but told the AFP news agency that any concerns of the prime minister would be addressed “at the highest command levels”.

He really should have stopped at “not aware of the order”. Now he’s gone and said that our top generals in Iraq will have to decide in consultation with Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush whether our military forces in Iraq will obey Maliki’s order. That parses out to: “The sovereign nation of Iraq? Like bloody frigging hell!”