I have no real opinion on this, I just posted the link because Drezner is right wing, a former unpaid advisor to Cheney in 2000. It does seem like someone was out to sabotage Baker though. There's no problem in barring them from contracts or asking them for loan forgiving. The point is doing them both at the same time seems bound to annoy them and drive them away, and not to bully them into helping.

Likely they wouldn't have helped anyway, and since many of the subcontractors are French and German anyway it seems doubtful they care much. In other words France and Germany are already getting a lot of the contracts anyway and now have an excuse to be enraged and save having to forgo loan repayments.

OTOH it looks like Bush stuck it them which is maybe good for politics. In fact they seem to have stuck it to Bush which is probably good for their politics so everyone is happy, except for the people who want intelligent foreign policy.