Sadr finally did it.
Mr. Sadr’s pullout from the cabinet is a sign of his rising tensions
with Mr. Maliki, who got his position in a contest against the candidate of
a rival Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
only because of Mr. Sadr’s support.(snip)
Last November, Mr. Sadr ordered his legislators and ministers to suspend
their participation in the government to protest a meeting between Mr. Maliki
and President Bush in Jordan that Mr. Sadr had opposed. The Sadr politicians
returned to the government after two months.Mr. Aaraji said Monday that Mr. Sadr had no intention of reclaiming his cabinet
positions this time. Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to Mr. Maliki, said
Mr. Maliki was coming up with replacements for the ministers and would soon
submit a list of names to Parliament. … ..
Juan Cole weighs in and assesses the damage.
I now count those who would probably vote against al-Maliki if the question
was called this way: The Iraqiya List of Iyad Allawi: 25; The Fadhila Party:
15; the National Dialogue Front (secularist Sunnis): 11; Sadrists: 32. That
is 83. I don’t know what the Iraqi Accord Front (fundamentalist Sunnis) would
do. They have 44 seats. If they voted against, that would be 127. It would
take 138 to cause the government to fall, which means that if the Sunnis were
disgruntled enough, and if a few (11) other Shiites defected, even al-Maliki’s
powerful coalition of Kurds and fundamentalist Shiites could not protect him.
I think the Iraq government is gradually collapsing; likely the end state
is just dysfunctionality rather than anything dramatic. There was a Lebanese
parliament all through the Civil War there, it just did not do anything and
couldn’t meet (the parliament building lay on the Green Line along which the
fighting raged). – Juan
Cole
You know you’re in real trouble when you start rooting for dysfunctionality in
Iraq. I’d like someone to ask Mr. Bush who makes up the Iraqi Accord Front.
Who makes up the National Dialogue Front? We’d get that oh, so common deer in
the headlight look from him, no doubt.
But this is just too much anymore.
Since U.S. and Iraqi forces began implementing their new Baghdad
security plan Feb. 14, nine soldiers from the battalion have been killed.
No battalion has had more. Even harder, after a relatively uneventful deployment
that began last November, those nine deaths have occurred in the past 32 days.“It just seems like it’s been blow after blow after blow,”
said the battalion’s chaplain, Capt. Roger McCay. “They’re sad. Very
sad,” he said of the battalion’s 750 soldiers. “They question, ‘Is
this how it’s going to be from now on out?’ “When the escalation began, it came with predictions of a corresponding
escalation in casualties, especially in Baghdad, the focus of the strategy.
Two months later, the predictions have become fact: There have been 76 deaths
of U.S. soldiers in Baghdad between Feb. 14 and April 14, compared with 42
hostile deaths in the period between Dec. 16 and Feb. 13. … ..
What is it going to take?
What?
I ask you, what?
How much further into this desert hole are we going to dig ourselves? …and
for what?
When will it end?
When?
How far will we stretch our soldiers?
If this doesn’t stop we’re looking at the end of the best volunteer army in
the world. You’re also looking at a draft. You may not want to hear it but it’s
the truth, because we’ve got many fronts on which to fight.
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