A preview of Maliki’s coalition — What happened before and after the announcement!

The first event was one day before the announce­ment of Maliki’s new coali­tion, Ammar AL-Hakim made a U-turn in one of the basics of ISCI’s ide­ol­ogy, that will pro­voke a debate not within the Shi­ite cir­cles only, but inside INA itself.

In a sud­den devel­op­ment, Ammar Al-Hakim leader of the ISCI told Iraq Al-Sumaria TV (not men­tioned on the TV’s web­site) that he (ISCI) dif­fer­en­ti­ates between the gen­eral mem­bers the Ba’ath Party and the “Sad­damists” who sup­ported the sup­pres­sion and destruc­tion of the Iraqi people.

Ammar Al-Hakim told the TV chan­nel that he sup­ports the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with the Baathists who were “forced” to be mem­bers in the Ba’ath Party, and asked to “adopt” the Ba’athists with one con­di­tion: — Not to take sov­er­eign min­istries such as secu­rity, defense and finance.

Ammar Al-Hakim aim is to hit many birds in one stone:

- Directly tar­get­ing Maliki’s insis­tence of no rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with Ba’ath Party after the bloody Wednes­day. Maliki repeat­edly said that he wants to build a national project, while at the same time he called for the expul­sion of the Baathists and not to deal with them as allies of the Tak­firis (infi­dels) and al-Qaeda.

- A call to open a new page with Sunni-Arab lead­ers, whom Maliki tried to con­tain dur­ing the last period.

- Com­mit­ment of the new approach to the Arab world, after Maliki’s attempts to close the doors on an Arab solu­tion for the Iraq — Syria polit­i­cal crisis.

The sec­ond event was few min­utes after Maliki’s announce­ment, and the tim­ing wasn’t coincidence.

Call­ing the sit­u­a­tion: “Now we can play with open cards”. Hum­mam Hamoudi (INA) said the following:

The next three months (90 days) will be ded­i­cated to ques­tion the per­for­mance Maliki’s gov­ern­ment, telling peo­ple the truth of what was going on dur­ing the past years.

Maliki’s Coali­tion

The media tries to sell Maliki coali­tion as a National, pan-Arab polit­i­cal coali­tion (BBC head­line: Maliki launches pan-Iraqi bloc, Gulf News head­line: Iraq’s Al Maliki joins with Sun­nis in elec­tion bid), and with a lit­tle help from from the Amer­i­cans to boost Maliki’s chances, a deci­sion crit­i­cized by the secu­rity bloc in the par­lia­ment say­ing that the speed up of the with­drawal of the Amer­i­can forces is not real­is­tic.

Maliki’s Dawa Party is a reli­gious Party, the full name is Dawa Islamic Party. Ideas, ide­olo­gies and the prin­ci­pals which the party estab­lished upon never changed, even when Maliki had a big chance to do so, in the Dawa Party Gen­eral con­fer­ence six weeks ago.

Although Maliki said that 40 polit­i­cal blocs joined his coali­tion (images and full speech in Ara­bic), the real num­ber doesn’t exceed 15 blocs, most of the names are non­ef­fec­tive par­ties and blocs, with­out real polit­i­cal weight on the ground (accord­ing to the state­ment: There are nego­ti­a­tions with 30 blocs more).

Names not reported in the link above are:

- Kafa’at — led by Ali Al-Dabbagh (yes, the same one).

- Iraqi Com­mu­nist Party (denied the par­tic­i­pa­tion later say­ing: Some mem­bers of the party joined Maliki’s coali­tion as inde­pen­dents, and they are expelled from the com­mu­nist Party).

- Nuhudh – led by Sheikh Khalid al-Yawar.

- The Iraqi-Arabs Blocs — led by Abdul Karim Alabtan.

- Jumu’a (Salah al-Din Province) – led by Sab­han Al-Janabi.

- Al-Tajamu’a –Mehdi Hafidh.

- Turk­men Islamic Union — led by Abbas al-Bayati.

Some inde­pen­dent MPs:

- Jaber Habib Jaber. — Safiya al-Suhail. — Sheikh Sami Azara Al-Ma’jon. — Sheikh Ali Hatim al-Suleiman.