“Ali Khedery is chairman and chief executive of the Dubai-based Dragoman Partners. From 2003 to 2009, he was the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq, acting as a special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors and as a senior adviser to three heads of U.S. Central Command. In 2011, as an executive with Exxon Mobil, he negotiated the company’s entry into the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.”

George W. Bush and Nouri al-Maliki. Birds of a feather… After Bush, Obama became a Maliki booster.

This is how the Washington Post describes Khedery, and why his article in that newspaper is important. It’s called Why we stuck with Maliki — and lost Iraq. In it, Khedery clearly describes the exact steps the Bush and then the Obama administrations took to keep their control over the Iraqi regime. It gives a much clearer picture to exactly how a major capitalist power such as the US controls a foreign government.

But it also gives a clear picture of something else: The weakening of US capitalism on a world scale.

In his article, Khedery describes how the Iranian regime intervened and how US capitalism was unable to stop them. Among other things, Khedery explicitly refers to the economic crisis in the US as being one factor.

The entire article is geared to prove that the sectarian dissolution of the Iraqi state was avoidable… had the Obama administration only listened to his advice. But then, he unintentionally disproves exactly that claim. He refers to “countries across the Middle East fracture(ing) along ethno-sectarian lines”. What makes him think that Iraq could be any different as long as one capitalist clique or another is in office?