Reidar Visser has a superb post today that tries to skewer an idea apparently now making the rounds re Iraq’s coalition-formation challenge: Namely, why not have a wall-to-wall coalition of all the parties rule the country?
He describes such a governance formula as, “particularly unattractive and potentially destructive for Iraq as a state”, and says it,
- would mean a sorry return to Iraq of 2003 and the “governing council” that was put in place by Paul Bremer back then. Its hallmarks will be indecision, incompetence and corruption – the inevitable characteristics of a government that has no single vision or unity of purpose, and basically has been thrown together with the aim of letting as many people as possible prey on the resources of the state in the hope that this will keep them from fighting with each other instead.
There’s a good discussion under the main post. At the end of it, Visser tells us that,
- The result is supposed to come out at a press conference tomorrow (Wed) in Najaf. That’s according to Salah al-Ubaydi. We’ll see if they are better than IHEC in sticking to their self-imposed timelines!
At some point the two-thirds majority required to elect a President had to blow up in its creators faces. The process of forming a government in Iraq is tortuous. Its design almost guarantees protracted conflict, stalemate, and paralysis.
But this is apparently what the American occupiers had in mind back in the days when Biden was promoting the fragmentation of Iraq, divvying Iraq up into three, sectarian entities and many provincial ones that oil companies could then wrest better deals from.
http://www.giulianasgrena.it/immagini/2009/Prehome_baghdad-a-misura.jpg