Well I have decided maybe I gave the clerics too hard a time in my earlier post concerning their willingness to speak on matters beyond their expertise.  At least they have matters of expertise, it is unbelievable watching cable news, or what little of it I get here in Baghdad, and listening to these idiots spout off about Iraq when they clearly don’t have a clue what they’re saying. My favorite was Tom Friedman’s latest McEditorial in which he indicated that Maliki was “formerly” of the Da’wa party and had now put together a broad,  Pan Iraq nationalist coalition together known as the “Rule of Law.”

I’m just wondering which of all the senior Maliki advisers helped the Prime Minister successfully unload that pile of crap onto this guy.  Maliki tried to create that multiwhatever coalition, and he failed.  Mutlaq abandoned him, Mashahadani said no, the Iraq Islamic Party wasn’t interested, there isn’t a Kurd of note who will have anything to do with him, Samarra’i, Ayad Allawi, Adnan Pachachi, everyone said no.  It’s Da’wa, the old Da’wa, his inner circle, with a handful of independent people of "let's be charitable and call it moderate" renown (Hachem al Hassani, the Sunni former Speaker, for example) from other areas.  Sure he has "Sunni tribal leaders and other minorities" as Friedman notes.  So does the other Shi'a coalition, the biggest Sunni tribe in Basra in fact is with them.  It's not hard to get a Sunni or two to join your coalition, or vice versa.  If they aren't powerful enough to make the major Sunni lists, they either ally with one of the Shi'a lists, or they are out and can't get the approximately $30,000 a month salary with benefits each MP makes.  Dangling $30,000 a month per position in front of a tribal chief can do wonders.  The real question is who with real power, with a real choice, did Maliki draw that was not already part of the broader Shi'a bloc.  Nobody. All he did was split that bloc into two, that's the news.  The shi'a have a choice, there's a split, the pan Iraqi list does not exist.

Certainly nobody you would describe as one of the top fifty most powerful Sunnis in the country, or the top two hundred most powerful Kurds in the country, are on or near his list.  I mentioned this piece to a close Maliki adviser the other day, she and I organized a conference together this past week (she’ll remain nameless here of course), we had a laugh over it.  She knows I’m not a Da’wa person, but she did ask me whether or not if I was, and a white foreigner had come over for a few days to write about Iraqi politics, I’d really have not tried the same thing.  I admitted I would.  Maliki has got smart people, I’ll give him that. What I don’t get is the purpose of these newspaper columnists.  Maybe the extinction of print journalism is a bad thing, seems so anyway, but it’ll be hard to miss the columnists.  It's the first column I've read in about three months (someone emailed it to me), and probably the last I'll read in a long while.  If you really want an opinion about Cambodia, honestly a NY Times columnist doesn’t know a tenth of whatever some blogger out there devoted to the country does, no reason to waste your time with some generalist his readership doesn't make up for his ignorance.

Anyway, rather than waste more time on a rant, much has happened in the past week or so, bombs that exploded not far away most dramatically, but most importantly, a trip to Najaf to visit the four Grand Ayatollahs.  What a wonderful experience it was, and a great opportunity to see the country’s highest clerics all in a day.  There is much to report on this, and I’ll use a few posts and fora to do it.  One thing I did want to talk about was the Najaf clergy in national reconciliation.  That will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.

 
HAH