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.