Maliki’s Bid to Keep Power in Iraq Collapses / U.S. Speeds the Path to Deportation.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq warned that insurgents could take advantage of the current political crisis and increase instability in the country.

Video Credit By Reuters on Publish Date August 12, 2014. Image CreditThaier Al-Sudani/Reuters                           

N.Y. TIMES
 Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s defiant fight to retain power in Iraq  collapsed after his former backers in Iran, the military and his own party all signaled that he could no longer expect their support.

He issued a statement saying that the security forces, which he had deployed around the capital on Monday in what some took to be preparations for a coup, should stay out of politics. And the conversation in Baghdad shifted to how he would leave office and on what terms.

The shift came after Mr. Maliki made several last-ditch efforts to shore up support, only to be confronted late Monday night with delegations of officials, all pleading with him to back down for the good of the country.

The next morning, an important Iraqi Army general in Baghdad reached out to Iraq’s new president, Fuad Masum, and the man he nominated to be the next prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, and delivered the message that the military would not stand by Mr. Maliki, according to a senior Iraqi official.

Some Iraqis said privately that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s influential Shiite cleric, also played an important role in orchestrating Mr. Maliki’s retreat, dispatching emissaries to Iran and successfully seeking the government’s cooperation in pressuring Mr. Maliki.  

Ayatollah Sistani was known to have been increasingly vexed over the political paralysis in Baghdad as militants with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, were gaining ground. 

 

The Obama administration, which has deployed United States warplanes to help the Iraqi government battle a marauding force of Sunni militants in northern and western Iraq, has been pressing Mr. Maliki to move aside. President Obama and his top aide congratulated Mr. Abadi on Monday and exhorted him to quickly form an inclusive government that would depart from Mr. Maliki’s polarizing policies, which have alienated many in the Sunni and Kurd minorities.

 

Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the United States would consider expanding military and political support for Iraq if Mr. Abadi assumed the duties of prime minister and formed a more inclusive government.

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Central American migrants released by the authorities last month. Officials are moving swiftly to expand family detention. Credit John Moore/Getty Images        

N.Y. TIMES

After declaring the surge of Central American migrants crossing the border a humanitarian crisis, the Obama administration shifted sharply to a strategy of deterrence, moving families to isolated facilities and placing them on a fast track for deportation to send a blunt message back home that those caught entering illegally will not be permitted to stay.

 

In a far corner of the New Mexico desert, in the town of Artesia, more than 600 women and children are being held in an emergency detention center that opened in late June. On Friday, officials began filling up a new center in Karnes City, Tex., for up to 532 adults and children, and they are adding beds to a center for families in Pennsylvania that now holds about 95 people.

 

Most of the debate over the illegal influx has centered on about 57,000 unaccompanied minors apprehended since October. But the number of minors with parents has increased even faster, nearly tripling to more than 22,000 so far this year from about 8,500 in all of 2013, according to the Pew Research Center. More than 40,000 adults and their children — an unprecedented number — were caught along the southwest border, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

 

Until recently, most families were released to remain in the United States while their deportation cases moved slowly through the courts. But that policy fueled rumors reaching Central America that if parents arrived with young children, they would be given permits to stay. To stop such talk, officials said, they are moving swiftly to expand family detention.

 

Capitalizing on U.S. Bombing, Kurds Retake Iraqi Towns, Maliki Refusing to Resign

Men who volunteered to fight with Kurdish forces took up position in Mosul, Iraq, on Sunday. Credit Mohammed Jalil/European Pressphoto Agency       

With American strikes beginning to show clear effects on the battlefield, Kurdish forces counterattacked Sunni militants in northern Iraq on Sunday, regaining control of two strategic towns with aid from the air.

The developments came as political tensions mounted in Baghdad. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki went on state television early Monday and redoubled his demands for a new term.

The American airstrikes, carried out by drones and fighter jets, were intended to support the Kurdish forces fighting to defend Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, according to a statement by the United States Central Command. They destroyed three military vehicles being used by the militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and damaged others, the statement said, adding that the warplanes also destroyed a mortar position.

 

 

 

President Obama and other American officials have said that more ambitious American support would be predicated on the Iraqi political leadership breaking a long deadlock and appointing a new prime minister, one who would head a more inclusive government than the Shiite-dominated administration of Mr. Maliki, and who could reach a political settlement with Iraq’s disaffected Sunni population.

 

 

But the political crisis deepened at midnight Sunday as a deadline expired for President Fouad Massoum to choose a nominee for prime minister. Mr. Maliki angrily accused Mr. Massoum of violating the Constitution by not choosing him. “I will complain to the federal court,” Mr. Maliki said.

 

One senior Iraqi official said that overnight Mr. Maliki had also positioned more tanks and extra units of special forces soldiers loyal to him in the fortified Green Zone of government buildings in Baghdad. The official said Mr. Maliki had “gone out of his mind, and lives on a different planet — he doesn’t appreciate the mess he has created.” A Kurdish news agency reported that presidential guards were “on high alert to protect the presidential palace,” and the capital swirled with rumors about what might happen next.

In Washington late Sunday, a senior administration official said that the United States had not confirmed reports of abrupt military movements in Baghdad, including rumors that tanks had surrounded the presidential palace, but that it would monitor the situation closely.

 

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Palestinian women grieved for Mohammed al-Anati, a boy who was killed in clashes with Israeli troops, at the Al-Fawwar refugee camp near the West Bank town of Hebron on Sunday. Credit Nasser Shiyoukhi/Associated Press        

 

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on Sunday accepted Egypt’s proposal for a new 72-hour cease-fire in the Gaza fighting, which began one minute after midnight on Monday, and agreed to resume Egyptian-mediated negotiations toward a more durable solution.

But several previous cease-fires have collapsed or expired, followed by renewed fighting, and it was not immediately clear whether the sides had moved nearer to an agreement on the contested issues.

   

OBAMA OK'S AIRSTRIKES & HUMANITARIAN FOOD DROPS IN IRAQ AFTER ISIS TAKES MOSUL

Doug Mills/The New York Times  
 

N.Y. TIMES

Speaking from the State Dining Room at the White House, President Obama said he had directed U.S. military forces to conduct targeted airstrikes on Islamic militants if they moved to take the city of Erbil. He also said that U.S. military aircraft had dropped food and water to thousands of Iraqis stranded on a mountain in northern Iraq. Mr. Obama also declared that he had run for the presidency in part to end America’s involvement in the Iraq war, and he repeated his promise that the United States would not send ground troops back to that country.

Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar west of Mosul, took refuge on Thursday in Dohuk province. Credit Ari Jalal/Reuters        

 

The crisis gripping Iraq escalated rapidly on Thursday with a re-energized Islamic State in Iraq and Syria storming new towns in the north and seizing a strategic dam as Iraq’s most formidable military force, the Kurdish pesh merga, was routed in the face of the onslaught.

The loss of the Mosul Dam, the largest in Iraq, to the insurgents was the most dramatic consequence of a militant offensive in the north, which has sent tens of thousands of refugees, many from the Yazidi minority, fleeing into a vast mountainous landscape.

 

Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people have fled from Mosul to the Kurdish capitol Erbil, also known as Arbil, after the latest wave of advances from Islamic militants that began on Sunday

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2719203/

 

ISIS forces are threatening to massacre thousands of people trapped in mountains in northern Iraq. "When many thousands of innocent civilians are faced with the prosect of being wiped out, we will take action," he said, earlier saying ISIS's plan for the 40,000 Yazidis constitues an act of genocide.

 

The Kurds had tried to seize on the chaos. protect their borders and consolidate their autonomy, while staying out of Iraq’s broader civil war. The pesh merga were considered well armed and well motivated, determined to protect their Kurdish enclave in the north.

But the latest fighting has shown that even the pesh merga are not up to the fight with ISIS. Kurdish officials have complained of a lack of ammunition and begged American diplomats for more weapons. But the United States, so far, has held off on significant arms shipments to the Kurds, fearing that it could undermine the central government in Baghdad.

 

Now, the Kurds have been battling a group of militants from ISIS who are using powerful American weapons they took from the battlefield, left by the Iraqi Army.

“They are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it,” said Ali Khedery, a former American official in Iraq, who over the years has advised five American ambassadors and several American generals.

 

ISIS has already used Iraq’s water supply as a weapon. Earlier this year it seized control of the Falluja Dam, in Anbar Province, and flooded a vast area that sent thousands of refugees fleeing, submerged hundreds of homes and several schools and interrupted the water supply to southern Iraq.

 

Ammar Jassim, a 35-year-old resident of Falluja, fled the city earlier this year not because of the fighting but because of the flooding. “We lost everything,” he said. “It was a water invasion.”

If the Mosul Dam were to be damaged, “it would be like a tsunami coming down the Tigris,” said Azzam Alwash, a prominent environmentalist and engineer and the founder of Nature Iraq, a nonprofit group.

 

[There was]  the sense that the country was rapidly coming apart, as ISIS militants swept across northwestern Iraq. The militants, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, view Iraq’s majority Shiite and minority Christians and Yazidis, a Kurdish religious group, as infidels.

 

As chaos tore through northern Iraq, political intrigue unfolded in Baghdad, with political leaders meeting late into the night in the fortified Green Zone to choose a replacement for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

 

 

American officials have worked to engineer his ouster, believing he is incapable of establishing a national unity government acceptable to Iraq’s main minority groups, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. American officials have implied that more military aid would be provided if Iraq’s political class chose a new leader.

As Iraqi leaders, the country’s top religious authorities and top Iranian officials, who wield considerable power within Iraq, pushed for Mr. Maliki’s removal, he was refusing to step aside Thursday night. Even those within his own State of Law bloc were demanding that he leave.

 

If he were to step down, Mr. Maliki has reportedly demanded immunity from prosecution for himself, his family and his inner circle, and a massive security detail, paid for by the state.

Given the number of enemies he has accrued over his time in power, and the well-documented instances of human rights abuses, torture and extrajudicial killings under his watch — not to mention wide-scale corruption at the highest levels of his government — many believe that Mr. Maliki would be immediately under threat of arrest, or assassination, were he to leave office without guarantees of immunity and protection.

 

 “Maliki knows if he steps down, virtually he is a dead man,” said Mr. Khedery, who was once close to Mr. Maliki himself.

IRAQ DELUSIONS AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

N.Y. REVIEW OF BOOKS, JESSICA MATHEWS

 Jessica Tuchman Mathews is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has served in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the White House.

The story most media accounts tell of the recent burst of violence in Iraq seems clear-cut and straightforward. In reality, what is happening is anything but. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), so the narrative goes, a barbaric, jihadi militia, honed in combat in Syria, has swept aside vastly larger but feckless Iraqi army forces in a seemingly unstoppable tide of conquest across northern and western Iraq, almost to the outskirts of Baghdad. The country, riven by ineluctable sectarian conflict, stands on the brink of civil war. The United States, which left Iraq too soon, now has to act fast, choosing among an array of ugly options, among them renewed military involvement and making common cause with Iran. Alternatives include watching Iraq splinter and the creation of an Islamist caliphate spanning eastern Syria and western Iraq.

Nouri al-Maliki; drawing by Pancho

Much of this is, at best, misleading; some is outright wrong. ISIS, to begin, is only one of an almost uncountable mélange of Sunni militant groups. Besides ISIS, the Sunni insurgency that has risen up against the government of Nouri al-Maliki includes another jihadi group, Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam), as well as the Military Council of the Tribes of Iraq, comprising as many as eighty tribes, and the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, a group that claims to have Shiite and Kurdish members and certainly includes many Sunni Baathists once loyal to Saddam Hussein.

This is a partial list. The important point is that within the forces that have proven so powerful in recent weeks are groups with profound differences, even mutual hatred. ISIS, for example, has turned on al-Qaeda, its parent, for being too moderate, and considers Baathists to be infidels. These disparate groups are fighting together now, yes, but they won’t be together for long. And they have been fighting in places where local populations are friendly to them. It will be a different matter when they meet the tough and motivated Kurdish peshmerga or Shiite forces in the Shiites’ own regions.


The story, which has seemed to be all about religion and military developments, is actually mostly about politics: access to government revenue and services, a say in decision-making, and a modicum of social justice. True, one side is Sunni and the other Shia, but this is not a theological conflict rooted in the seventh century. ISIS and its allies have triumphed because the Sunni populations of Mosul and Tikrit and Fallujah have welcomed and supported them—not because of ISIS’s disgusting behavior, but in spite of it. The Sunnis in these towns are more afraid of what their government may do to them than of what the Sunni militia might. They have had enough of years of being marginalized while suffering vicious repression, lawlessness, and rampant corruption at the hands of Iraq’s Shia-led government.

What is happening now—not its details, but its essentials—was clearly evident at the time of President Bush’s “surge” seven years ago. The premise for the added American troops then was that insecurity in Iraq blocked political reconciliation. If the violence could be reduced, the administration argued, reconciliation would follow—but it didn’t. The important agreements on the eighteen political “benchmarks” specified by the US never were carried out and haven’t been to this day. (They included, for example, laws that were supposed to distribute oil revenue equitably and reverse the purge of Baathists from government.) When a government is wrenched apart, especially an authoritarian one, a struggle for political power immediately fills the vacuum. In Iraq the struggle has been, and continues to be, within sectarian groups almost as much as between them. Among the Shia, for example, Muqtada al-Sadr has openly opposed Maliki. The US presence forced the struggle into nonviolent channels for a while, but it could neither remove nor resolve the multiple contests for political power that continued to be fought.

 

Had the US been willing to stay longer, might the artificial peace its troops imposed have turned into a real one? Perhaps it might have, if American forces had continued to occupy Iraq for another decade or two. But it is unlikely that Iraq or its neighbors would have been willing to tolerate our presence for that long, and people can nurse a political dream or a desire for revenge for far longer even than that. Iraqis knew that someday we’d be gone and they would remain. They could afford to wait.

Nor did we give short shrift to building up Iraqi security. Iraq has a huge military apparatus—a million men under arms—extensively and expensively trained, and equipped with American weapons. It is a fantasy to argue that another year or two of the US presence would have fundamentally altered Iraq’s military response to the jihadists, for an army will not fight well for a government it does not respect. As Admiral Michael Mullen told Congress in July 2007, shortly before becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Iraq needs political reconciliation; “barring that, no amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference.”

What Prime Minister Maliki has done since taking office eight years ago is to systematically exclude and abuse Iraq’s Sunnis. He has justified everything from denial of government resources to arbitrary arrest and torture on the grounds that he is fighting a war against terror. But he has pointedly failed to classify Shia violence—including, for example, dozens of killings by Asaib, a Shia militia in Basra—as terror. At the same time, he has put himself at the center of the state’s power at the expense of its other institutions. Parliament is powerless and government ministries, the judiciary, and the security forces are politicized and corrupt. The criterion of appointment is loyalty to Maliki, not competence. Lawless Shia militias, answerable only to their leaders, supplant the army and police. Under varying degrees of US pressure to change this behavior, Maliki has nonetheless enjoyed US backing throughout, including through two reelections.

There is no military solution to this state of affairs. The solution must be political, and the fact that there is only a slim chance of success does not make doing the wrong thing any more sensible. The administration should not be stampeded by either Washington hawks or cries of imminent collapse from Baghdad into mission creep on the ground or into becoming Maliki’s air force. Instead, over the coming month or two, it should use all its strength to push for a new Iraqi prime minister and a government that can make a credible case for Sunni and Kurdish support....

At the same time, the situation cannot be resolved domestically. Every state in the neighborhood has its hand in the mess. There will have to be an international effort to shore up a more workable government with the US, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and others involved, perhaps under UN auspices (though one could wish for a more able and energetic secretary-general). All share, to some degree, an interest in avoiding stateless anarchy, Sunni or Shia, on their borders.

Finally, this is the time for the US to reconsider the political goal it has pursued since 2004 of a strong central government in Iraq. It has held steady to this goal through countless changes of tactics—but none of core strategy—and it has done so without success.... Without moving toward division of the country, a more federal vision for Iraq—in which its regions enjoy greater autonomy and the central government less power (though it would have to include a workable division of oil revenues)—is better suited to a country in which mutual fear, real and perceived wrongs on all sides, and the momentum of violence will continue for years to come.
—July 10, 2014

ADM. EXPLORES TALKS W/IRAN IN IRAQ CRISIS. IRAQ LDR AL-MALIKI KEEPS SUNNIS & KURDS MARGINALIZED IN GOVT.

 N.Y. TIMES, MICHAEL GORDON & DAVID SANGER

A senior American diplomat met with his Iranian counterpart in Vienna on Monday to explore whether the United States and Iran could work together to create a more stable Iraqi government and ease the threat from Sunni militants.

The initial meeting took place after Secretary of State John Kerry signaled that the Obama administration was open to cooperating with Iran on Iraq,

The Obama administration’s strategy is to pressure Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and his Shiite-dominated government to form a multisectarian government with Sunnis and Kurds in an effort to heal the rifts being exploited by the insurgents. But that goal could be frustrated if Iran decided to back hard-line Shiite leaders or sent Quds Force fighters into Iraq, aggravating the already inflamed tensions.

 

Complicating the picture are the parallel talks between Iran and world powers on its nuclear program.

With an initial July 20 deadline for an agreement looming, one expert who has periodically advised the American negotiating team said there was already “a recognition the Iranians will try to milk any help on Iraq to get any advantage they can” as they haggle with the lead negotiators over how much of their nuclear infrastructure can remain if a final nuclear agreement is reached.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani

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In a sign of the growing dangers in Iraq, Mr. Obama notified Congress on Monday that he is sending as many as 275 military personnel to augment security and provide support for the heavily fortified American Embassy in Baghdad. The United States has already announced plans to evacuate a significant number of embassy personnel.

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The outreach to Tehran was a surprising turnabout for the Obama administration, which has not held talks over regional crises with Iran. Cooperation between the United States and Iran to contain the Iraqi crisis would represent the first time the two countries have jointly undertaken a common security purpose since they shared military intelligence to counter the Taliban in Afghanistan after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Kerry, in fact, worked furiously in January to persuade the United Nations to disinvite Iran from the Geneva peace talks on Syria, arguing that Tehran’s military support to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, disqualified it from participating.

 

 

N.Y. TIMES

 

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has presented himself as the man who could bring Iraqis together, but with the collapse of his army before a Sunni militant assault, he has taken on only one role — that of commander in chief of Iraq. 

He is spending much of his time on the military side of the presidential compound, while some of his close civilian aides have taken to wearing starched military fatigues. He spends the better part of his day running the war.

He meets with military commanders, travels to the front lines, makes speeches at recruiting drives rallying young Shiite men and, not infrequently, falls into fits of anger, according to members of his inner circle.

What he does not do, by all accounts, is spend much time on the political reconciliation with the Sunni Arabs and Kurds that his international allies in Washington and Tehran have insisted is his country’s only possible salvation. Even his top aide in charge of reconciliation said Monday that he thinks it is all but hopeless at this point.

 

 

President Obama has made it clear that the United States will not provide military support unless Mr. Maliki engineers a drastic change in policy, reaching out to Sunnis and Kurds in a show of national unity against the Sunni militants, whose shock troops are the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Without that, analysts say, the country is at risk of a renewed sectarian war in which Baghdad could lose control over nearly a third of the country for the foreseeable future.

 

But Mr. Maliki is showing few signs of changing his ways. Just as he did in a similar, though not nearly as threatening, crisis in 2008 in Basra, he is pinning his hopes on the military option. He is determined to use the Shiite fighters he trusts to stabilize the country and, he hopes, rout the Sunni insurgents and reimpose the government’s control over its territory.

For now, Mr. Maliki’s public message to Mr. Obama is that it is just not possible to work with the Kurds and Sunnis right now, that the army first needs to retake lost ground.

Mr. Maliki, 63, has long shown a stubborn streak, an unwillingness to bend his principles. He spent much of his life as a dissident, working to oust the former president, Saddam Hussein.

 

Sectarian civil war: Shiite tribal fighters raise their weapons and chant slogans against the al-Qaeda-inspired ISIS group in Baghdad as Iranian-backed militias move in to spearhead what Shiites see as a fight for survival against Sunni militants

In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, Shiite tribal fighters on Monday chanted slogans against  the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Credit Nabil Al-Jurani/Associated Press        

He lived in exile for 24 years, and secrecy became a way of life, in order to avoid arrest. The experience left him wary of all but his closest associates. He did not appear destined for higher office but was encouraged to run for prime minister in 2006 by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, in part because he was viewed as incorruptible.

Mr. Maliki surprised the United States and other Western governments by sending his army forces in 2008 against Shiite militias loyal to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, which at the time were destabilizing the country. But in more recent years he has not appeared willing to repeat that step and has hewed more to sectarian policies.

At times it has looked almost as though Mr. Maliki was going out of his way to alienate the Sunnis. After the Sunni tribes helped to defeat Al Qaeda in 2008, he cut off much of their funding.

In search of insurgents, Mr. Maliki has authorized mass arrests of Sunnis and held many of them in prisons outside the law. He has also accused a prominent Sunni politician, Tariq al-Hashimi, of running a death squad, driving him into exile in Kurdistan, and has similarly gone after other prominent Sunnis.

 

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq led a meeting with military officers during a visit to the city of Samarra on Friday. Credit via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images       

 

Convinced that there is a conspiracy to undermine him, Mr. Maliki speaks often of “failed politicians” who are working with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, while his associates describe “dirty deals” between the Kurds, ISIS and the Sunnis. Sunnis have lost patience and now simply want the prime minister to resign.

 

Shiite politicians have said there are some immediate gestures Mr. Maliki could make that would help ease the tensions. He could release the thousands of Sunni prisoners detained by his security forces and being held without trial. He could make common cause with Sunnis and Kurds with statements against the Sunni militants, and he could work with them to bolster the military instead of turning to Shiite militias.

 

The worry is that, barring reconciliation, Iraq will split into a Sunnistan and a Shiastan, said a former ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker.

“Either we intervene at the White House and the secretary of state level or this is going to devolve into a bloody stalemate,” he said, “a line of demarcation between north and south, to be determined, but probably just north of Baghdad and the establishment of a de facto Al Qaeda state, and that’s completely terrifying.”

 

Many Shiite politicians, worried about the fate of the country, have begun offering alternatives to Mr. Maliki’s approach. [They urge him to] reach out to Kurds, thanking them for receiving refugees and recommending a national reconciliation.

 

That does not mean that Mr. Maliki has lost faith in all Sunnis. He still has words of praise for the Sunni tribes with whom he has long worked, and who have fought and lost large numbers in battling Qaeda-type extremists in western Iraq.

But Mr. Maliki has little faith in the Sunni political leaders,

As recently as last week in the wake of the fall of Mosul, Mr. Maliki appeared to have a chance to create a unified multisectarian, multiethnic block to fight ISIS and those who support it. In a long late-night meeting with Sunni and Kurdish leaders, it appeared they might emerge with a unified stand. Hours passed, and when they emerged there was no agreement.

It turned out the Sunnis proposed raising in effect a Sunni army, a sort of new version of the tribal Awakening Councils that fought Al Qaeda in 2007 and 2008. But that idea was rejected by Mr. Maliki, even as the Shiite militias were beginning to organize.

While the idea of separate Sunni and Shiite armies is an indication of the depths of the sectarian divide, Mr. Maliki’s inability to use the moment to try to build trust is telling,

 

The suggestion of many is that Mr. Maliki has lost so much credibility that the best thing that could happen would be to form a new government with a different leader who might inspire more trust. But for now Mr. Maliki is not stepping down, and it seems unlikely that there would be enough unity to anoint a successor anytime soon. [Further,] it is widely accepted in Iraqi politics that any plausible candidate for the post of prime minister must also be acceptable to Iran.