Mr President, Pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins

I wrote yesterday that this new offensive by the Administration to set a timetable for a timetable - and once again to focus on a military solution to the troubles in Iraq, and offer no viable political and diplomatic path forward - didn't pass the pre-election laugh test.  According to the NYTimes, it looks like the Iraqi Prime Minister agrees:

Iraq’s Leader Jabs at U.S. on Timetables and Militias

BAGHDAD, Oct. 25 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki put himself at odds on Wednesday with the American government that backs him, distancing himself from the American notion of a timetable for stabilizing Iraq and criticizing an American-backed raid on a Shiite militia enclave.

Speaking in Baghdad just hours before President Bush held a news conference in Washington, Mr. Maliki tailored his remarks to a domestic audience, reassuring the millions of Shiites who form his power base that he would not bend to pressure by the American government over how to conduct internal Iraqi affairs.

His comments stood in stark contrast to the message given Tuesday by the top two United States officials in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who said the timetable for political measures had been accepted by the Iraqi government.

“I want to stress that this is a government of the people’s will, and no one has the right to set a timetable for it,” Mr. Maliki said at a news conference broadcast on national television.

“This is an elected government, and only the people who elected the government have the right to make time limitations or amendments,” he said, stabbing the air with his hand.

The remarks pointed to a widening schism between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and the Americans who support it.

As the violence here increases and midterm elections in the United States approach, Mr. Maliki has come under pressure from the Bush administration to step up efforts to control the violence. But the very forces that elevated him to power and whose support he must retain — religious Shiite parties with their own militias — are complicit in the violence.

That tension was on display in his remarks on Wednesday. While acknowledging the problems presented by militias and death squads — groups of men with guns that American military officials say are some of the primary culprits in the new phase of bloodletting here — Mr. Maliki said pointedly that the main factor driving the violence was insurgents and militant fighters, largely Sunni, who have been killing Shiites for more than three years.

“Saddamists and terrorist groups are responsible for what is going on this country and the reactions,” he said, in a reference to retaliatory killing by Shiite militias that began after the February bombing of a shrine sacred to Shiites. “We should contain the reactions.”

Mr. Maliki’s stance differs sharply from views presented by American officials, who speak of Shiite death squads as an evil equal to that of the Sunni insurgents. But it fits snugly inside the circle of hardening Shiite sentiment that the American military, in keeping full control of security, has not given the Iraqi government full power to intervene when Sunni militias or insurgents carry out sectarian cleansing..."