these options. i hear what richard is saying, you couldn t have the president go out and say maliki had to go as a price for the u.s. to get involved. in many ways, that was the subtle message he was saying. and perhaps a term limit and agree not to a third term which we ll talk about in a bit. we talked earlier with john mccain and what he thinks about the obama administration, what they should do. we ll hear from that in a moment. we ll be right back. we have enormous interests there and obviously our troops and the american people and american taxpayers made huge investments and sacrifices in order to give iraqis the opportunity to chart a better course, a better destiny. but ultimately they are going to have to seize it.
soldiers to fight. and this is a consequence of terrible mismanagement of the government and corruption by maliki and we obviously are paying a very heavy price for that. nor john mccain today. ken pollack, recently returned from baghdad, was there in spring and met with u.s. and iraqi officials including maliki and served as cia military analyst and national security council under president clinton. thank you. you have a good sense of where maliki is. is he going to change and do the things now that he resistded for all of these years in terms of sunni rivals? i m pretty pessimistic about it. when i saw him last, he was looking forward to a big electoral victory and didn t seem to want to use it to reach his opponents and wanted to do things his way.
or perhaps even agreeing to open back up the formation of governing process but he basically did. he said he needs assurances to do this. it looks like that s i love he said he wants some options as mik reported, they have the options. he has a, b and c. now, he can weigh obviously he s going to weigh those options but this is really about negotiating publicly now with maliki and sending the message. we re not helping until you put some promises because it s your army that s laying down their arms and your you ve got governance problems and you ve got to make real promises here and political solution. iraq s ambassador says we can t do political solutions until there s breathing space from the militants. maliki has arrested sunnis, put people in prison. been authoritarian.