Embattled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ratcheted up his high-stakes and increasingly bitter dispute with the Bush administration, telling the U.S. ambassador that he was Washington’s friend but “not America’s man in Iraq,” aides said on Saturday. ~The International Herald-Tribune

It is actually probably good news for America that Maliki is thumbing his nose at us and declaring his independence, such as it is.  First, it convinces war supporters that the man we installed as prime minister in place of Jaafari is actually the leader of a “sovereign and independent Iraq,” which will make it easier for them to wash their hands of the mess now that they have a visible leader whom they can start blaming when things become worse (the cry will be, as it is already starting to be said, “You can’t blame Bush for any of this–it’s that lousy Maliki and his minions!”).  It will provide the disgruntled American public with a new Iraqi leader whom they can resent and declare “ungrateful.”  It will also give the Iraqis (who understand that even if he is no longer our man he is still Sadr’s man) something to laugh at, even if it is with a bitter laugh, as they must be in terrible need of a good laugh right about now.

The issuing of the joint statement is something, but usually people will issue joint statements only because their relationship is so frayed and bad (as we now see U.S. relations with Maliki to be) that they have to state publicly what ought to be a long-established commitment of cooperation on something glaringly obvious, which is in this case the need to clamp down on death squads.  As diplomatic band-aids go, it’s not a bad one, but it won’t stay on so long as Maliki has to keep trying to show that he is independent (and Sadr and his ilk will keep pushing him on the inside and criticising him on the outside so that he does this).  This problem will not go away, because an occupation premised on hegemonist policy goals (which I believe is now, officially, the goal of draining the swamp with the flypaper of democratic peace on the road past Mount Doom that runs to Jerusalem) does not mesh well with an Iraqi government that assumes all of this talk about Iraq being a self-governing nation means something.