With friends like these...

By Edward Copeland

The Bush family and their foreign policy teams sure have a history of not fulfilling promises to their allies, especially in the Middle East.

While Bush I was right in not toppling Saddam at the time, since all of his advisers, including that model of Dick Cheney, agreed the chaos that would ensue wasn't worth the cost of additional American lives, they also encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam on their own. As the Shiites in the south moved to do just that, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf let Saddam go ahead and crush them, in no small part leading to the resentment we face there now.

Now, another friendly Iraqi has been placed in a quandary that the U.S. seems either unwilling or unable to prevent. As reported exclusively by NBC News, former Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed, who now awaits execution by an Iraqi court, actually was working as a double agent for the U.S. Hashim worked with a CIA task force following the first Gulf War, feeding them information about Saddam and helping them to try to encourage his overthrow.

On top of that, Hashim was introduced to the CIA by Iraq's current president, Jalal Talabani, and who will be charged with the task of signing Hashim's death warrant for war crimes. Talabani wants nothing to do with it.

It seems something went wrong during this invasion. Hashim ended up as one of the players on the U.S. deck of cards and was forced into hiding, where he was promised by none other than Gen. David Petraeus that:

... I offer you a simple, yet honorable alternative to life on the run from Coalition Forces in order to avoid capture, imprisonment, and loss of honor and dignity befitting a General Officer. I officially request your surrender to me. In turn, I will accept this from you in person. You have my word that you will be treated with the utmost dignity and respect, and that you will not be physically or mentally mistreated while under my custody."

Hashim did surrender to Petraeus, under the assumption that he would received immunity for charges that loomed over his head related to Saddam's attacks on the Kurds. Soon after, the U.S. military handed Hashim over to the Iraqi court that sentenced him to death.

Talabani, himself a Kurd, is now in a, to say the least, awkward position, given the task to carry out a death sentence of a former friend and ally in the fight against Saddam on charges relating to the deaths of his own people.

I used to urge him to rebel against the government, and he used to cooperate," Talabani said last month. "So how can I now authorize his execution? I just can’t."

What will become of Hashim? It's difficult to say right now, but it is yet another example of the sheer incompetence with which this administration executed their war on Iraq.