Monday, December 31, 2018

Editorial: No, he's not qualified to be prime minister

At the end of October, Adil Abdul-Mahdi became prime minister.  The following month, he threatened to resign. It's a threat he should follow through on.

All this time later, he still can't put together a complete Cabinet (he was supposed to have done that before being named prime minister but the Constitution doesn't seem to matter in Iraq).

Even now, as ISIS continues to carry out attacks in Iraq, the security posts (Minister of Interior and Minister of Defense) remain empty.

Last week, Adil seemed quite pleased with himself for finally finding someone for Minister of Education .  As an added bonus, it was a woman.  So maybe the critics would finally stop pointing out that his Cabinet was all men?

But any good news from Thursday's action was out the window on Saturday:

For a little over two months now, Iraq's Prime Minister Adil Abdul al-Mahdi has struggle to form a Cabinet.  After the disappointment of his failure to appoint people to head the security ministries (Minister of Interior and Minister of Defense), the big criticism was his failure to appoint a single woman to his Cabinet.  Last Thursday, he managed to finally find a woman who he was comfortable working with:  Shaima Al-Hayali.

The Parliament was comfortable with her as well and she was confirmed to the Cabinet as Minister of Education.

That was Thursday.  Today?  She resigned. (Or offered her resignation.  Presumably, it's accepted).

RUDAW reports she came under criticism because her brother worked with ISIS.


Accused of?

Normally, we would say "accused of."  But in her resignation statement she acknowledges that he did work with ISIS (she states he was forced to).

Which goes to just how inept the prime minister is.

How do you miss that?

How does your background check miss that?

And if you don't miss it, how do you not anticipate the uproar that will greet this nomination?

Yet again, we are confronted with the reality that Adil Abdul al-Mahdi is not qualified to be prime minister.




He really needs to follow through on that resignation threat.


How stupid do you have to be to nominate someone who's brother was in ISIS?

Pretty damn stupid.

And that's how the US government likes their puppets in Iraq.  And that's why things never improve in Iraq.