Talabani’s attempt to oust Maliki, demonstrators hanged a statue of George Bush

This is the funny side of SOFA:

While the Amer­i­can law­mak­ers are com­plain­ing about the Secu­rity agree­ment say­ing that their copy is a direct trans­la­tion from the Ara­bic ver­sion, Iraqi law­mak­ers com­plain that their copy in Ara­bic is a trans­la­tion from the Eng­lish version.

As for Al-Hayat’s report that Maliki threat­ened with res­ig­na­tion in case the par­lia­ment rejects SOFA (which is a good news for the Kurds), this will hap­pens sooner than Maliki him­self expects.

There are some sus­pi­cious, silent move­ments among the Shi­ites and the Kurds polit­i­cal blocs behind the screen worth to be reported:

Admit­ting the dif­fi­culty to pass the secu­rity agree­ment, Green Zone news­pa­per Al-Sabah reported today that Pres­i­dent Tal­a­bani vis­ited Al-Hakim two days ago to dis­cuss the last devel­op­ments in the polit­i­cal scene, and today we learned from Nahrain that Al-Hakim met with Adel Abdul-Mahdi for the same rea­son above. These meet­ings sounds nor­mal except that Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported today:

Iraqi Pres­i­dent Jalal Tal­a­bani pres­sur­ing the par­lia­ment to pass the secu­rity agree­ment and gave remarks and sug­ges­tions of the re-formation of Nuri al-Maliki’s government.

Iraq-ina has more on this subject:

Tal­a­bani moves pub­licly to oust Maliki

Tal­a­bani met with the par­lia­ment speaker Al-Mashhadani to dis­cuss the for­ma­tion of National Unity Gov­ern­ment. Sources close to Tal­a­bani said that Al-Hakim’s Supreme Coun­cil gave the green light for such movement.

Sad that the NYtimes doesn’t show you this image of the demon­stra­tion today, or even the part when they hanged George Bush with suit­case car­ry­ing SOFA in the hand.