It may be off the news but the faikure in Iraq marches on

September 25, 2007

News Analysis

Maliki Gains Time, but Faces a Daunting Task

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD, Sept. 24 - Now that President Bush has extracted more time from

Congress to show results in Iraq, the country's unpopular prime minister,

Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, appears to have won a reprieve from American talk of

pushing him aside.

But Mr. Maliki, who is meeting with Mr. Bush at the United Nations on

Tuesday, appears still a long way from being able to forge political

reconciliation. Many Iraqis describe his political position as increasingly

perilous. A growing number of legislators in Parliament are trying to topple

him, and in several provinces Shiite militias are successfully challenging

government security forces.

Mr. Maliki's popularity has shown no improvement over the past several

months; services remain poor and movement on legislation is all but

nonexistent. But the reduced violence in Baghdad brought about by the

increase in American troops has blunted some of the frustration with his

government.

He recently cast his lot with a new coalition to which he is now indebted

for his survival, but the coalition has limited appeal on the street and few

longstanding ties to the prime minister. Furthermore, even with its support,

Mr. Maliki's margin in Parliament is thin, making it extremely difficult for

him to advance his policies.

Seventeen ministries now are without a minister and those ministers who

are left are in many cases doing double duty, making it difficult to improve

the performance of the agencies and allow them to deliver desperately needed

services like electricity and water.

"Al-Maliki doesn't have enough support to fill the seats of the ministers

and push through his political program because his government doesn't have a

working majority in the Parliament," said Jaber Habeeb, a political

scientist at Baghdad University, who is also a member of Parliament.

And Mr. Maliki also must watch his back as his opponents begin to rally

around the idea of offering a vote of no confidence in his government. For

the moment, they appear to lack the votes necessary to bring him down, but

it is close. Some are making lists of members of Parliament who would

support a "no-confidence" motion to see if it is possible to obtain the 138

votes necessary to remove him. Under Iraqi law, the prime minister and his

government can be removed by a vote of no confidence that is supported by a

simple majority in the 275-member Parliament.

"There is serious movement around a vote," said Ezzet al-Shabandar, a senior

member of the secular Iraqiya Party, which is led by a former interim prime

minister, Ayad Allawi and opposes Mr. Maliki. But, Mr. Shabandar added, some

of Mr. Maliki's opponents are from religious parties and they would like the

tacit assent of the religious leaders in Najaf, including the Grand

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to remove Mr. Maliki. It is still unclear whether

Ayatollah Sistani will take sides.

The Bush administration's decision to continue backing Mr. Maliki appears to

have been driven in part by the lack of an alternative . And the

administration seems to be hoping that in the next few months the parties of

former exiles that now back Mr. Maliki will see it as in their interests to

push the government to be more responsive and to persuade Parliament to

approve legislation.

Western diplomats in Baghdad say Mr. Maliki must move quickly. Diplomats are

watching to see if he can fill the vacant cabinet posts in the next 30 days

and they are looking for any signs of dissatisfaction from the new coalition

of parties backing him - the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, led by the

Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim; Dawa, Mr. Maliki's party; and the two

Kurdish parties. This new alliance does not control even a majority of the

votes in Parliament.

Although Iraq professes to have a unity government, the unity often seems to

exist in name only, with the different parties dividing up the spoils, like

control of ministries, rather than trying to make the government efficient,

and with the different factions disagreeing on many policy positions.

Almost from the beginning, Mr. Maliki had poor relations with the Sunni Arab

bloc and was often at odds with the secular party led by Mr. Allawi.

Ministers from both groups left their posts last summer. The Sunni Arabs

protested repeatedly about the treatment of their constituents by the

Shiite-dominated security forces and complained that they were not really

part of Mr. Maliki's decision-making.

And Mr. Maliki's new coalition partners do not really strengthen his hand.

The Kurds are not a major force outside their own region. The Supreme

Islamic Iraqi Council, a Shiite party, is struggling to hold on to its power

in several southern provinces where its militia is battling forces close to

Moktada al-Sadr, an anti-American cleric. Although the council has a

sophisticated political organization and an armed wing, the Badr

Organization, it lacks the street credibility of the Shiite group led by Mr.

Sadr's supporters because many of the Supreme Council's members lived in

exile until the American invasion.

Mr. Maliki has distanced himself from the Sadrists and thrown his support to

the Supreme Council. One result is that now the Sadrists openly criticize

his performance, a stance that is likely to reverberate on the Shiite

street, further undermining him.

" We've not seen any progress in Maliki's performance and he didn't

contribute anything useful to Iraqi society since he filled the position of

the prime minister," said Salih al-Ikaili, one of the leaders of the Sadrist

bloc in Parliament. "His performance now is worse than at any other time in

his regime."

The Sadrists are not a bloc that can be ignored, according to political

analysts. They represent too many Iraqis; their militia is too active; their

social services organizations deliver necessities to the poor; and unlike

other Shiite groups, they have adopted a truly nationalist platform, which

reaches out to Sunni Arabs.

The next weeks will be critical to Mr. Maliki's political survival,

according to Americans and Iraqis who watch the government closely. He will

need to broaden his narrow group of advisers, who come almost exclusively

from his Dawa party, to include other Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. He

will need to fill at least some of the vacant cabinet posts and he needs to

show progress on legislation.

But most of all, he needs to deliver some hope of a better life to Iraqis.

" So far al-Maliki has not succeeded ," said Ziad Furat Al Jubori, 38, an

engineer in Mosul. "Although the police and the army are here, the

extremists, the Islamic State of Iraq has control in all of Mosul. They

throw people into a panic with killings, beheading in public and threatening

people. I do not think that al-Maliki will change his course. That is why

the government and the prime minister should be changed."