Daawa wins

So it is Jawad al-Maliki as UIA nominee. He is a Daawa person.
I’ve been traveling and busy for the past 48 hours. I flew back into Philadelphia yesterday, from Amman. I’m here in Philly for a meeting today, then back home to Virginia tonight.
When I posted here Thursday, I wrote, ” if Jaafari does step down (and I think this is a very remote possibility) then his replacement as UIA nominee will still be someone from the Daawa-Sadr bloc who can be expected to follow exactly the same, firmly pro-withdrawal policy.”
Okay, so Jaafari stepping down was not as “remote” a possibility as I had thought… But Daawa has still won the big battle of wills against Talabani and the Americans.
On Juan Cole’s blog today, he has an amazing collection of links, extracts from documents, and fulltext translations of documents related to Maliki’s nomination, and the reaction of various Iraqi parties to it. His putting these materials up into the public blogosphere is a real service to all of us who seek informed discussion of events there.
On another note, I saw before I left Amman yesterday that the “Iraqi religious leaders gathering” they’d been planning there, for today, has been postponed. Understandably, given the close involvement of many of those religious leaders in Iraq’s political affairs.
I gotta run. I do have one more thing I want to post here before I go off to my meetings. I’ll try to write some more commentary on the Maliki nomination a little later over the weekend.