Uh Oh! Will Bush Send Iraq To Bed Without Its Supper Again For Believing It's Independent From U.S.?

As I noted last night - and a month before that, and six months before that, and... you get the idea - President Bush continues to get more and more pissed that every Iraqi citizen (left alive there in Bush's war-torn occupation, that is) isn't falling at his feet and bowing in extreme gratitude for all he's (blame, he passes; credit he wants exclusively) done for them. Bush believes Tony Snow's press releases and thinks he really is the salvationator... er... savior of Iraq. Saviors, he knows, are supposed to get everything they want!

So he's really going to get cheesed once he learns that someone in the Iraqi government forgot that they are only supposed to be puppets to the Bush-Cheney masters rather than the increasingly sophisticated, beautiful, charming, and dynamic democracy Bush keeps saying they are. Posted by dedalus at Blah3 today:

I guess Iraq didn't get that part of the memo that said The Plan (more like The Stall) requires a shunning of Iran and Syria. I'd read that the Iraqi government had requested the release of the Iranians captured by US forces in Irbil, but I hadn't realized how much further they've gone:

Iraq's foreign minister, responding to a U.S. raid on an Iranian office in Irbil in northern Iraq last week, said Monday that the government intended to transform similar Iranian agencies into consulates. The minister, Hoshyar Zebari, also said the government planned to negotiate more border entry points with Iran. [....]

"We, as Iraqis, have our own interest," Zebari said in an interview with The Times. "We are bound by geographic destiny to live with" Iran, adding that the Iraqi government wanted "to engage them constructively." [....]

To Iraq, Iran is its biggest trading partner and a source of tourist revenue, mainly from the thousands of Shiite Muslim pilgrims who travel to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala every year.

In Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish north, much of the economy is founded on trade with Iran and the smuggling of contraband into the Islamic Republic. Since the 1979 founding of Iran's theocracy, Kurdistan has been a transit point for banned alcohol, movies and satellite dishes.

The U.S. raid on the Iranian office, which handled visas and other paperwork for Iraqis traveling to Iran, struck at the heart of Kurdistan's economy, which depends on commercial ties with Iran facilitated through that office.

Doing business with Iran also means doing business with the Revolutionary Guard, an institution that controls Iran's borders.