The international investigation team that came to Iraq to check on election results announced that they are delaying the announcement of their report until Thursday.
The interesting thing about this is that the team said they’d disclose their report after the team members leave Iraq! This suggests that the team wants to avoid upsetting any particular Iraqi party while they are still here.
Parties that opposed the preliminary results such as Maram have high hopes on this report; not because they think it can grant them more seats in the parliament as everyone knows now that final results won’t be much different from the preliminary ones but rather because those parties want something that officially proves fraud has taken place regardless of the size of this fraud. It’s just the mere idea that any proven fraud will give Maram and the like more bargaining power to face the UIA with and they think that then, the UIA will not be able to force its point of view regarding the formation of the government and thus will have to reach a compromise with the others and give them a better share.
As serious negotiations between the rival parties stopped, another type of meetings appeared. Those parties are taking place between two parties at a time and are considered to be “chatting” as described by Hassan al-Bazzaz from the Accord Front who told al-Mada paper that these meetings were requested by officials from the American embassy that is making efforts now to approximate the points of view of the major blocs and encouraging them to talk to each other more frequently. Al-Bazzaz pointed out that in the beginning there had been talks between the Accord Front and the embassy in the effort to agree on a way to come out with an “accordance government”.
In the same report, a member of the Front who preferred to remain anonymous said that “the front respects the choice of the people but the UIA has to be reasonable in their demands and must not try to get all the top government posts to themselves…we were asked to choose between the defense and interior ministries and we chose the interior considering these hard times”.
The same member said he expects the formation of the government to be like a “hard labor” and will take a long time until all politicians find out that there’s no other choice but accordance.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda is getting more isolated in Iraq and their announcement today of uniting the lines of 6 organizations reflects the critical position al-Qaeda is sitting in right now especially after residents and tribes of Anbar and Salahiddin are uniting against foreign terrorists.
In this regard, al-Sabah reported today that Samarra is having a new city council to coordinate the process of rebuilding the city and after they had formed teams to fight foreign terrorists. Also al-Hurra TV reported that PM Jafari and US ambassador Khalil Zad visited Ramadi and pledged to allocate 75 and 400 million $ respectively to accelerate the reconstruction efforts in Anbar apparently as a reward to the people of Anbar for the positive attitude they've adopted.
I think that now it seems that the greatest danger facing Iraq is not al-Qaeda because this rejecting this organization by the Iraqi people was just a matter of time; the greatest danger right now is the possible interference of the neighbors in Iraq’s internal affairs to destabilize the country and impede the political process in the effort to escape the pressure applied by the international community on those neighbors and I think the interference this time will focus more on recruiting certain political powers in Iraq to implement the plans of those countries rather than using old allies like al-Qaeda or other terror groups.
The reason why I’m expecting this to happen is because lately we’ve been hearing Syrian and Iranian officials repeatedly saying that America wouldn’t dare escalate the situation with them as long as America is stuck in the Iraqi swarm.
It looks like the regimes in Syria and Iran have their eyes focused on the “Iraqi swarm” and forgetting the swarms forming beneath their feet…
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