The recent political development in Iraq is interesting, but the reality is not what’s reported.
The U.S. told al-Maliki to convene a ‘crisis summit’ and to produce a new united government that would include enough votes to hand over Iraq’s oil. As Gulf News wrote:
The changes will be in "the structure, nature and direction of the Iraqi state," a senior American official in Baghdad was quoted by AP as saying.
He did not give out details, but the plan is expected to be high on the agenda of a ‘crisis summit’ which would be attended by key Iraqi leaders who seek to save the crumbling national unity government of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki.
The ‘crisis summit’ went by and the Associated Press put some good news on the wires:
The new Shiite-Kurdish coalition will retain a majority in parliament — 181 of the 275 seats — and apparently have a clear path to pass legislation demanded by the Bush administration, including a law on sharing Iraq’s oil wealth among Iraqi groups and returning some Saddam Hussein-era officials purged under earlier White House policies.
181 out of 275 is quite a comfortable majority one would think. But the AP’s numbers are simply wrong.
As Juan Cole remarks:
One problem with the new coalition, according to Al-Hayat writing in Arabic is that it probably has no more than 110 seats in parliament, 20 less than a simple majority, and so does not protect al-Maliki from losing a vote of no confidence should one be called. While that difficulty would be resolved if they could attract the Iraqi Accord Front to join them, this development seems unlikely at the moment.
The new coalition Maliki put together excludes all Sunni parties, the Shia Fadillah party and the Sadr movement as well as Allawi’s National List. All of these do not agree with some major points on al-Maliki’s agenda and have other demands.
Indeed insteed of finding some new ‘unity’ the ‘crisis summit’ manifested deep splits and keeps the government and the parliament inoperable. Writes Abu Aardvark:
This is a devastating outcome for the Maliki government and for those Americans who hoped to have some political progress to show in the upcoming Crocker/Petraeus report. There’s no other way to spin this: this summit was billed as the last chance, and it has failed.
…
There’s still some minor chance that Maliki can pull this back from the brink, but it looks deeply unpromising. The Kurdish-Shia four party alliance has taken to calling itself "the majority" – perhaps learning from the smashing success of Siniora’s government in Lebanon? – which does not bode well for their willingness to attend to the demands or concerns of "the minority."
But I suspect that’s exactly the plan. Just like in Lebanon and in Palestine, where Abbas abolished the elected government, the new Maliki coalition, "the majority" that is none, may become the officially U.S. accepted "legitimate democratic government".
It’s will not be easy to spin it that way, but the record tells that the U.S. media, fed by misleading AP stories, will likely fall for the sham.