{"id":2865,"date":"2004-10-27T09:28:17","date_gmt":"2004-10-27T14:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2865.html"},"modified":"2004-10-27T09:28:17","modified_gmt":"2004-10-27T14:28:17","slug":"allawi-goes-off-message","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/allawi-goes-off-message\/","title":{"rendered":"Allawi goes off-message"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s interim prime minister, seemed content last month to appear with Bush as a campaign prop on the White House South lawn<\/a>, even allowing a Bush campaign staffer to prepare his remarks<\/a> for an address to Congress.<\/p>\n

Now, however, the man Bush praised as a “courageous leader” and a “friend” has gone off-message. I’m sure someone at the White House is wondering whether a BC04 aide can write all of Allawi’s remarks from now on, but until then, the interim head of Iraq isn’t doing Bush any favors.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, for example, Allawi accused foreign troops (read: Americans) of “gross negligence”<\/a> in the massacre of 49 Iraqi National Guard recruits over the weekend.<\/p>\n

This comes a month after Allawi abandoned his White House talking points and said the Iraqi insurgency is a far bigger threat<\/a> to stability than the Bush administration admits. He also acknowledged significant obstacles to planned January elections and expressed frustration that the Iraqi security force “is not well equipped and is not respected enough to lay down its authority” — all of which is at odds with Bush’s message.<\/p>\n

Complicating matters further, as Kevin Drum noted<\/a>, it was also Allawi’s government that decided, seemingly out of the blue, to tell the IAEA about the Al Qaqaa facility’s missing 377 tons of deadly explosives.<\/p>\n

Outside of anti-democracy Russia and pro-theocracy Iran, does anyone<\/i> in other countries want four more years of Bush?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s interim prime minister, seemed content last month to appear with Bush as a campaign prop on the White House South lawn, even allowing a Bush campaign staffer to prepare his remarks for an address to Congress. Now, however, the man Bush praised as a “courageous leader” and a “friend” has gone off-message. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2865\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}