Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Supreme cleric Sis­tani (Abdul Mahde AL-Karbala’i) warned against the post­pone of the elec­tions as sched­uled (16–01-2010), his argu­ment was: The post­pone will con­tains many risks and ten­sions that could lead the Iraqi polit­i­cal arena to a new round of polit­i­cal and secu­rity chaos and instability.

The fail­ure of the Iraqi par­lia­ment to pass the new elec­tion law means more complications:

- The cur­rent par­lia­ment term will end.

- that dif­fer­ences over the elec­tion law will con­tinue to exist.

Some Iraqi par­ties con­sider the delay in the elec­tion law is a sce­nario pre­pared in advance by Maliki and his allies for the fol­low­ing reasons:

- to extend the term of the recent Iraqi parliament.

- to extend the term of the cur­rent Iraqi government.

The Iraqi man­age­ment of the elec­tion crisis:

So far, there are no clear indi­ca­tions on how the Iraqi pres­i­dent Jalal Tal­a­bani will inter­vene in the cri­sis to exer­cise his pres­i­den­tial pow­ers over the polit­i­cal cri­sis which will take an oper­a­tional and leg­isla­tive dimen­sions (Talabani’s inter­vened in Kirkuk dis­pute and  warned to veto any law that gives Kirkuk a spe­cial elec­tion status).

In addi­tion to that, some Iraqi polit­i­cal par­ties warned against allow­ing the par­lia­ment to exploit the cur­rent polit­i­cal cri­sis to influ­ence the com­ing elec­tion, and called for the following:

- The trans­fer of Maliki’s gov­ern­ment to a care­taker government.

- Con­sti­tu­tion­ally and legally deal­ing with the sit­u­a­tion of the cur­rent Iraqi par­lia­ment after the end of its term so that it will be allowed to dis­cuss the elec­tion law only and noth­ing else.

There are few unsuc­cess­ful ini­tia­tives from the gov­ern­ment to find a solu­tion — Adil Abdul Mehdi — for example.

The US man­age­ment of the Iraqi elec­tion cri­sis:

The US ambas­sador in the United Nations Susan Rice arrived in Bagh­dad and held meet­ings with senior Iraqi lead­ers includ­ing Al-Maliki. Remark­ably, ambas­sador Rice did not address the elec­tion law issue.

In his meet­ing with Maliki in Wash­ing­ton, US Pres­i­dent Barak Obama told the Iraqi Prime Min­is­ter that the US closely watch­ing the devel­op­ments in the elec­tion law  and hopes that the Iraqi efforts will suc­ceed to approve this law as soon as pos­si­ble to allow polit­i­cal par­ties to have suf­fi­cient time to carry out the nec­es­sary elec­tion campaigns.

Many US mil­i­tary com­man­ders includ­ing Odierno (today 30-10-2009) said that the US forces will post­pone its with­drawal from Iraq in case the Iraqi par­lia­ment did not reach an agree­ment on the elec­tion law.

In other words, the post­pone of the Iraqi elec­tions would be a pres­sure on the Amer­i­can admin­is­tra­tion, a cir­cum­stance which will be used by the “anti-withdrawal from Iraq” Amer­i­can politi­cians and here lies the “core of the crisis”.

The Iraqi-Iraqi cri­sis soon will be a U.S.-U.S. dis­agree­ment, turns the U.S. Con­gress and the White House once again to the zero point of the “with­draw the US forces from Iraq” discussion.