U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said he was "impressed" by the commitment of Iraqi leaders to move forward on measures to speed political reconciliation in their war-ravaged nation after conferring with them in Baghdad today.
Cheney said he wasn't concerned that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders offered no firm timetable for enacting a package of steps such as the sharing of oil revenue that U.S. officials call crucial to the reconciliation effort.
"I was impressed with the commitment on the part of the Iraqis to succeed on these steps and to work together to solve these issues," Cheney told reporters after a day of meetings he said were conducted in the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad.
Completely unmentioned by Dick (or Bloomberg, for that matter) is that the iraqi parliament has adopted a timetable -- it just doesn't have a damned thing to do with oil sharing:
Alternet, via Think Progress:
On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.
[...]
Reached by phone in Baghdad on Tuesday, Al-Rubaie said that he would present the petition, which is nonbinding, to the speaker of the Iraqi parliament and demand that a binding measure be put to a vote. Under Iraqi law, the speaker must present a resolution that's called for by a majority of lawmakers, but there are significant loopholes and what will happen next is unclear.
The administration keeps saying that we're there because the government wants us there. What happens when it's clear they don't?
My money's on nothing at all happening. Bush will ignore it.
