One new thing did take place, the political stalemate turned 7 months old. Nouri al-Maliki and his spokesperson insist that it will soon be over but they were saying that two Fridays ago. In fact, they've been saying that repeatedly since the March 7th elections. In 2005, Iraq took four months and seven days to pick a prime minister. Progress would have been this year's elections leading to the formation of a government in less than four months. Tuesday, Steve Inskeep addressed the issue with analyst Michael Wahid Hanna on NPR's Morning Edition (link has audio and text):
Steve Inskeep: The news headlines suggest that Nouri al-Maliki, the current prime minister, is going to keep his job. Is that certain at this point?
Michael Wahid Hanna: It's not absolutely certain. But it's always been the odds-on most likely result, and that's a function of demography and politics. Iraq is a Shiite-majority country and so although his party was the runner-up in the March elections, it was always likely that he was going up as the premier one more time.
Steve Inskeep: Well, because nobody had a majority so it was a matter of assembling enough building blocks among these parties to have a majority.
Michael Wahid Hanna: That's right. He lost by two seats, his party did, but obviously the next step is to form a government. And it was always going to be difficult for Iyad Allawi, the leader of the rival Iraqiya list(ph), which is seen as a sort of secular list, although he is a Shiite. Most of his votes came from Sunnis and so it was always going to be difficult to construct a parliamentary block where they were the majority.
It was an opinion echoed when the International Crisis Groups' Joost Hiltermann spoke with the Council on Foreign Relations' Bernard Gwertzman about the stalemate:
Bernard Gwertzman: So, despite these latest stories over the long weekend, you're not necessarily enthusiastic that a deal has been struck?
Joost Hiltermann: No deal has been struck. The only thing that has happened is that Maliki was chosen to be the designated prime ministerial candidate for the Iraqi National Alliance, which is the reconstituted Shiite alliance minus the Islamic Supreme Council [headed by Adel Abdul Mahdi] and some other independents and smaller groups. So that's the only thing that has happened, but Maliki, even with that kind of blessing, simply doesn't have the number of seats that he needs in order to form a government.
Former US Ambassador Joe Wilson explained to The New York Daily News last week, "I just came back from Baghdad. And it's a mess. And I would really like to see us talk about why the f--- we're in there. We have 50,000 kids there. What are they doing?" Roger D. Hodge offered:
He has declared an end to the war in Iraq by redefining the mission of the 50,000 troops who remain there. Yet the war continues, our soldiers fight and die, and Iraq still lacks a functioning government.
We've seen much the same thing with ObamaCare. As with the Iraq War, Obama has merely redefined the mission. Far from being the universal health-care system that the country needs, Obama's health program is best understood as a bailout of the private health industry that seeks to guarantee some 30 million additional customers for insurance companies and continued obscene profits for large drug manufacturers. The paradox here is that in a system aiming at universal coverage, the actuarial role of insurance companies, which is to determine the precise odds of paying unprofitable claims on a given class of customers, has become obsolete.
The Iraq War goes on. It has not ended. But the MSM repeatedly tries to tell you it has and either due to ignorance or whoring or some mixture of the two, so many left and left outlets back that crap up.
As Ambassador Wilson said, we need to be asking why those soldiers are still in Iraq? There were no WMDs, Saddam Hussein was not a threat but he's now dead, so why are US soldiers still in Iraq?
