from the Juan Cole website today -
www.juancole.com <<The Iraqi National Party of Iyad Allawi is threatening to bolt from the 'national unity government.' Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Adnan Pachachi gave a speech in which he complained that the government of Nuri al-Maliki had not followed through on previous pledges to give Sunni Arabs a greater role in decision making. The Iraqi National List, which only has 25 members in the 275 member parliament, is made up of a mixture of Sunni and Shiite secular nationalists, some of them ex-Baathists. The problem with the 'national unity' government is that it was always a pious hope rather than a political reality. In actuality, the Shiite religious parties have nearly a majority, and on most issues they could get the Kurds to vote with them. This condominium of separatist Kurds and fundamentalist Shiites can always win a simple majority in any parliamentary vote, and that is what counts. As long as the Shiites stick together, and as long as they keep the Kurds with them by giving the latter concessions on autonomy, they just don't need Allawi's list or the Sunni Arab blocs.
<<If the story were only about Allawi's list withdrawing from the government, that would be unimportant. But its context is widespread rumors among expatriate Iraqis in Jordan that if the surge doesn't work and Nuri al-Maliki doesn't prove a reliable partner, the US might engineer a coup and put Allawi in power. As an ex-Baathist, he would be willing to deploy the iron fist, and, if that didn't work, would be a plausible negotiator with the Sunni Arab guerrillas. So if the withdrawal threat is tied to the menace of a coup, it is significant.>>
I predicted in a much earlier post that the U.S. would encounter the same problems and try the same solutions as it did in its earlier criminal aggression against Viet Nam, namely the so-called "dance of the puppets," a kind of revolving-door succession of coups and assassinations giving each new puppet a shot at subduing his countrymen for the benefit of his U.S. overlords until, hopefully, the right sort of iron-fisted dictator would emerge. All under the facade of a "democratically elected government," natch. So we are, or may be - - according to Prof. Cole - - coming closer and closer to closing the circle. The U.S. started with a pliable Ba'athist thug, Saddam, and may well finish with another one, Allawi, minus only the Ba'ath Party socialist program and plus the lion's share of the oil revenues and obscenely lucrative "reconstruction" contracts meant to soak up whatever share of the oil revenue would have had to be left, if only for appearance's sake, with the natives.
