from Juan Cole: Iraq’s al-Maliki Seeks Arrest of Sunni VP as Terrorist, Parliament in Uproar
Posted: 17 Dec 2011 09:44 PM PST Only a couple days after US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared the Iraq War over and turned the last US base in Iraq over to the Iraqi military, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has struck against a Sunni Arab vice President, Tariq al-Hashimi. Iraqi police have issued an arrest warrant for Hashimi, a member of the now Sunni-dominated Iraqiya Party. The Ministry of the Interior, which al-Maliki controls, confirmed the warrant. Three members of the VP’s security detail had been under investigation in recent days, charged with engineering a car bombing inside Iraq’s Green Zone on November 28, allegedly in hopes of assassinating al-Maliki. The car bomb had been constructed inside the Green Zone (a protected area in downtown Baghdad encircling government offices and embassies) which admittedly does point to a member of the political elite. It is alleged to have gone off prematurely. Apparently Hashimi is now being fingered as the mastermind of the car bombing. If the country’s vice president really is a terrorist, it is a sad commentary on the state of Iraqi politics. If he isn’t, then al-Maliki is deploying ‘war on terror’ accusations to grab complete power for his coalition of Shiite parties. The announcement of the warrant came just after the Iraqiya Party walked out of parliament (according to al-Hayat writing in Arabic), announcing a legislators’ boycott. Iraqiya holds 91 of 320 seats and is the single largest party in that body. The largely Sunni Arab members of parliament had been angry by what they described as PM al-Maliki’s tendency to dominate power centers, rule extra-constitutionally, and to deny Sunni provinces the right to form federated regions on the model of the Kurds’ Kurdistan Regional Government. The 2005 Iraqi constitution contains provisions for the formation of further confederated super-provinces. Hashimi, born in 1942, is a former officer in the Iraqi military and had been part of the Iraqi version of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2009 he switched to the largely secular Iraqiya Party led by ex-Baathist Ayad Allawi, a former CIA asset among the expatriate Iraqis in London. Iraq has a presidential council with three members, which functions as a sort of senate. It consists of a president (currently Jalal Talabani, a Kurd), a vice president (Shiite politician Adel Abd al-Mahdi) and another vice president. Hashimi has in the past been accused of holding up legislation for sectarian reasons. The ability of the presidential council to block laws, however, has been weakened.... [so Saddam has been replaced by someone who's slowly becoming a new Saddam?] -- Jim Devine / "In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
