The odds that they can muster the required votes to unseat him are low; even should they succeed, they are highly unlikely to agree on a common platform to form an alternative government. This would leave Maliki as caretaker prime minister until the next elections in 2014. In the meantime, his government will increasingly find it difficult to govern. All Iraqis will pay a price.
Iraq’s predicament is a symptom of a problem that goes far deeper than the unimplemented Erbil understanding or even Maliki’s personality. It directly relates to the inability to overcome the legacy of Saddam Hussein’s regime and its repressive practices: a culture of deep suspicion coupled with a winner-take-all and loser-lose-all form of politics.
Because it never produced a fair, agreed-upon distribution of power, territory and resources, the political bargaining that followed the regime’s fall did little to remedy this situation. The constitutional order the U.S. occupying power midwifed was an awkward patchwork that did not address core issues – the nature of the federal system; the powers of the president, prime minister and parliament; even the identity of the state and its people.
Worse, by solidifying an ethno-sectarian conception of politics, it helped fuel a conflict that at times has been more violent, at others more subdued, but has never wholly vanished.
The recurrent political crises that have plagued Iraq are the logical manifestations of this original flaw. Not once did the outcome of these recent cases tackle, let alone fix, the source of the impasse; rather, they were more like band aids, superficial agreements leaving issues either wholly unresolved or resolved but without an enforceable implementation mechanism.
What is more, with each episode the wound grows deeper: the gap between political parties widens, bolstering centrifugal forces first manifested in the 2005 process of drafting the constitution as well as in the substance of the text.
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