First– A funny-sad Q&A ses­sion with the U.S. ambas­sador in Chatham House, which is not cov­ered by Reuters — A reporter asked Hill: How come that the U.S. after seven years of occu­pa­tion failed to repair the basic pub­lic ser­vices in Iraq, espe­cially water and elec­tric­ity while Sad­dam manged to to pro­vide these ser­vice in a very short time, after the Gulf-war? Hill’s answer was: no comments.

Beside Ja’afari, Adel Abd Al-Mehdi and even Ja’afar Al-Sadr, Kuwaiti news­pa­pers say there are new names started to emerge as set­tle­ment candidates:

- Habib Al-Sadr, the for­mer direc­tor of the Iraqi Media Net­work.
– Ali Al-Dabbagh, Maliki’s spokesman.
– Kho­dair Al-Khuza’i, Min­is­ter of Edu­ca­tion.
– Sher­wan Al-Wa’ali, Min­is­ter of National Security.

In my last post I said that  the next step will be a very dan­ger­ous game, which is to mobi­lize the street. Allawi and the Sun­nis also started their own ver­sion of the “elec­tric­ity” rev­o­lu­tion, threat­ened with “peace­ful” demon­stra­tions in Anbar, if the power is not improved in the com­ing days.

Allawi also started to use the recent polit­i­cal chaos to cir­cu­late the “Saudi” rumor (pub­lished first by Saudi funded news­pa­per Al-Sharq Al-Awsat) of an assas­si­na­tion attempt against him, days after deny­ing these rumors first.

But it seems that Allawi is not the only one who thought of this plan, under a tem­pra­ture of 50 C, the Sardists and the Supreme Coun­cil started to mobi­lize the Shi­ites street, to take down Maliki and man­aged to put the Prime Min­is­ter in a very dif­fi­cult position.

Even nature played its role against Maliki, not the usu­ally sea­son for the south­ern provinces in Iraq, espe­cially Basra, Maysan, storms accom­pa­nied by heavy rains led to the dam­age of a num­ber of elec­tric­ity pylons, which increased the com­plex­ity of the prob­lem, espe­cially since Maliki ordered an increase of Basra share from the elec­tric power from 600 megawatt to 900 megawatt watts.

After the death of at least 1–2 per­sons dur­ing Basra demon­stra­tors, other provinces (Maysan, and Wasit) have taken firm action by the provinces author­i­ties in antic­i­pa­tion of the out­break of sim­i­lar demon­stra­tions, which gives an indi­ca­tion that Maliki’s rivals are mov­ing against him play­ing the card of the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of the pub­lic ser­vices, par­tic­u­larly electricity.

At the begin­ning, Maliki played down the demon­stra­tions, say­ing that the elec­tric­ity prob­lem is “an old prob­lem”, and he will ques­tion some of the offi­cials in the elec­tric­ity sec­tion, which means that the prime min­is­ter did not intend to offer any con­ces­sions to the par­ties that started the riots using the Iraqi-summer, which was coin­cid­ing with the sev­eral promises made by the Min­istry of Elec­tric­ity to improve the energy pro­duc­tion in the mid­dle of June.

Maliki, who has pre­vi­ously defended the Iraqi Min­is­ter of Elec­tric­ity Kareem Waheed in his ques­tion­ing ses­sion by the Iraqi par­lia­ment accused of steal­ing pub­lic money, forced the min­is­ter to offer his res­ig­na­tion to absorb the anger of the crowd in a num­ber of provinces and cities in south­ern Iraq (rumors say that Maliki threat­ened the min­is­ter to imprison him).

With the Sadrists and INA inten­tion to put the Prime Min­is­ter Maliki in a crit­i­cal cor­ner, and Maliki’s “State of Law” dom­i­nates the south­ern provinces in Iraq, the most dan­ger­ous sce­nario in the elec­tric­ity power cri­sis is to turn these events to clashes between the par­ties, coali­tions and blocs, and prob­a­bly the army will take sides, which will pro­vide rea­sons to delay the U.S. with­drawal from Iraq.

Leave a Comment




The revolution of electricity in the southern provinces topples the Minister, eyes on Maliki, while new names of candidates emerged

This article was written June 22nd, 2010, with the mathematical number of 0 contributions.