In Iraq, you should expect the unexpected. Like this:
Iyad Allawi’s bid to become Iraq’s prime minister again has received an endorsement from an unexpected source: the Baath Party. A spokesman for the exiled leadership of Saddam Hussein’s old party told TIME that Allawi “is the best person at this time to be given the task of ruling Iraq.” He said he hoped that Allawi would pave the way for the Baath Party to “return to the political life of Iraq, where we rightfully belong.”
Allawi, of course, is a Shi’ite.
Then there’s Moqtada al-Sadr, who is also doing whatever it is that Iraqis have to do to get their act together:
The radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr on Wednesday said that he was suspending for six months his Mahdi Army militia’s operations, including attacks on American troops, only hours after his fighters waged running street battles with Iraqi government forces for control of Karbala, one of Iraq’s holiest cities
Over at The Plank, Michael Crowley says:
it also happens to come at an extremely convenient moment for the Bush administration–just before the Petraeus-Crocker report and a new round of war funding votes in Congress
Yes, the timing is rather convenient for Bush’s new spin cycle. So what? It’s yet another indication that traumatized Iraqis are trying to move forward and deal with their reality: a broken, divided, shattered country plagued now not by Saddam and his vast network of enforcers but by sectarian militias—and also by al Qaeda, as Engram, a blogger I only recently started reading, notes repeatedly over at Talk Back.
Forget what you read in the political blogosphere, where, as screenwriter William Goldman said about another fantasyland, “Nobody knows anything.”
Check the interstices.
