Iraqi Parliament Vacation! Bamboozle! (Josh Marshall)

[KoKo]

I must confess that I almost feel sorry for the White House in their desperate attempts to spin the Iraqi parliament's vacation. Most of the bamboozlement that comes out of the White House these days is meant to cover up for the administration's failures and deceptions -- mainly how well things are going in Iraq, how the whole fight there is against al Qaeda, how jihadists in Pakistan can't send teams to the US unless we pull out of Iraq, etc.

But in this case, you know the White House really, really doesn't want these guys to take August off -- for pure optics, if for no other reason.

Now, I don't think these guys are going off to Biarritz -- okay, maybe some of them are. But I think it's a little misleading to imagine -- as the US conversation suggests -- that these folks are just a bunch of ne'er-do-wells or loafers. I think the whole drama puts the lie to the administration line in a more telling way. And that is that Iraq doesn't really have a government. It's a country that remains under military occupation. And the 'government' is just a group of factions playing a multi-layer chess game, partly under our watch and partly gaming out position for our departure. The key is that our timelines and deadlines are clearly not theirs. And they seem fairly indifferent to the benchmarks and dramas that the White House is telling the American people are so important.

In other words, the vacation issue appears to be both less and more than it seems -- not the caricature it's portrayed as in the American media perhaps but also a sign that the narrative of events the White House is feeding the US public is a sham.

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