Are you still buying

Well, let's shake off that final illusion right now.

The Bush administration is considering reserving a few high-level posts in the next Iraqi government for Sunni Muslims, regardless of how well they fare in next month's elections, for fear that their exclusion could prolong the country's military and political turmoil.

[...]

"There's some flexibility in approaching this problem," a White House official told the New York Times. "There's a willingness to play with the end result - not changing the numbers, but maybe guaranteeing that a certain number of seats go to Sunni areas even if their candidates did not receive a certain percentage of the vote."

Guardian article

Ah, democratic elections. Don't you just love them?

So much for speculation about how the Bush Administration was going to keep control over the Iraqi government.

Talk of guaranteeing Sunni representation has not been raised officially but, according to several sources within the state department, it is being seriously discussed both in the US and in Iraq.

[...]

Some Sunnis have called on the US and the Iraqi interim government to postpone the election while security improves - a request that has repeatedly been rejected by the Bush administration.

Instead, US officials have been mixing threats and promises to force the Sunnis to the polling station and on to the ballot papers.

I just can hardly bear to look any more.

Update 8:00 pm:

And not to put too fine a point on it...but, we get the booty.

The United States is helping the interim Iraqi government continue to make major economic changes, including cuts to social subsidies, full access for U.S. companies to the nation's oil reserves and reconsideration of oil deals that the previous regime signed with France and Russia.

During a visit here this week, officials of the U.S.-backed administration detailed some of the economic moves planned for Iraq, many of them appearing to give U.S. corporations greater reach into the occupied nation's economy.

[...]

to date all contracts let for "reconstruction" by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have gone to U.S. firms, which have then subcontracted some work to foreign companies.

[...]

Washington has installed hundreds of U.S. economic advisors in all Iraqi government ministries, who have a decisive say on most economic decisions. It has also sponsored the bulk of the nation's economic changes, based on a neo-liberal model that emphasises privatisation of government entities and cuts to social spending.

One major move the country is inching towards under U.S. guardianship, which was discussed this week, is a rollback of Iraq's huge subsidies system, which may have kept millions of Iraqis from starvation under U.S. and UK-backed sanctions imposed by the United Nations after the 1991 Gulf War.

Read it if you can stomach it.

Update 12/27: See today's post.