c-span coverage? (I hope, I hope)

Working on it.

OT: Steve, The New York Times reports that Bush wants al-Jaafari to step down. However, not too long ago he had this to say: "Every Iraqi who casts his or her vote deserves the admiration of the world. And free people everywhere send their best wishes to the Iraqi people as they move further into the light of liberty." George W. Bush, January 31, 2005

The United Iraqi Alliance, the group of Shiite political parties that won the most votes in Iraq's Jan. 30 election, selected Ibrahim al-Jaafari to be the prime minister of Iraq.

Isn't Bush totally out of line in calling for Iraq's P.M. to step down?

Iraq's Premier Asserts His Right to Stay in Office
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 29 — Facing growing pressure from the Bush administration for him to step down, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of Iraq vigorously asserted his right to stay in office today and warned the Americans against undue interference in Iraq's political process.

Mr. Jaafari also defended his recent political alliance with the radical anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, now the prime minister's most powerful backer, saying in an interview that Mr. Sadr and his thousands-strong militia were a fact of life in Iraq and need to be accepted into mainstream politics.

Mr. Jaafari said he would work to fold the country's myriad militias into the official security forces and ensure that recruits and top security ministers abandon their ethnic or sectarian loyalties.

The existence of militias has emerged as the greatest source of contention between American officials and Shiite leaders like Mr. Jaafari, with the American ambassador arguing in the past week that militias are killing more people than the Sunni Arab-led insurgency. Dozens of bodies, garroted or executed with gunshots to the head, turn up almost daily in Baghdad, fueling sectarian tensions that are pushing Iraq closer to full-scale civil war.

The embattled Mr. Jaafari made his remarks during the hourlong interview at his home, a Saddam Hussein-era palace with an artificial lake in the heart of the fortified Green Zone. He spoke calmly, relaxing in a black pinstripe suit in a ground-floor office lined with books like the multivolume "The World of Civilizations."

"There was a stand from both the American government and President Bush to promote a democratic policy and protect its interests," he said, sipping from a cup of boiled water mixed with saffron. "But now there's concern among the Iraqi people that the democratic process is being threatened."

"The source of this is that some American figures have made statements that interfere with the results of the democratic process," he added. "These reservations began when the biggest bloc in Parliament chose its candidate for prime minister."

The bookish, soft-spoken Mr. Jaafari is at the center of the deadlock in talks over forming a new government, with the main Kurdish, Sunni Arab and secular blocs in the 275-member Parliament staunchly opposing the Shiite bloc's nomination of Mr. Jaafari for prime minister.

Senior Shiite politicians said Tuesday that the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, had weighed in over the weekend, telling the leader of the Shiite bloc that President Bush did not want Mr. Jaafari as prime minister. That was the first time the Americans had openly expressed a preference for the post, the politicians said, and it showed the Bush administration's acute impatience over the stagnant political process.

Relations between Shiite leaders and the Americans have been fraying for months, and reached a crisis point after a bloody assault on a Shiite mosque compound Sunday night by American and Iraqi forces.

Mr. Jaafari said in the interview that Ambassador Khalilzad had visited him on Wednesday morning, but had not indicated that Mr. Jaafari should abandon his job. The two had spoken about forming the government, he said.

American reactions to the political process can be seen as either supporting or interfering in Iraqi decisions, said Mr. Jaafari, the head of the Islamic Dawa Party and a former exile in Iran and London. "When it takes the form of interference, it makes the Iraqi people worried," he added. "For that reason, the Iraqi people want to ensure that these reactions stay in a positive frame and do not cross over into interference that damages the results of the democratic process."

According to the Iraqi constitution, the largest bloc in Parliament, in this case the religious Shiites, has the right to nominate a prime minister. Mr. Jaafari won that nomination in a secret ballot last month among the 130 Shiite members of Parliament. But his victory was narrow; he came out on top by only one vote after getting the support of Mr. Sadr, who controls 32 seats.

That alliance has ignited concern among the Americans that Mr. Jaafari will do little to rein in Mr. Sadr, who led two fierce rebellions against the American military in 2004. Mr. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, went rampaging in Baghdad after the Feb. 22 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra and after a series of car bomb explosions on March 12 in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. The violence left hundreds dead and Sunni mosques burnt to the ground.

After the secret ballot last month, Sadr politicians said Mr. Jaafari had agreed to meet all their political demands in exchange for their votes. Mr. Sadr has been pushing for control of service ministries like health, transportation and electricity.

Mr. Jaafari did not say in the interview what deals he had cut with Mr. Sadr, but asserted that engagement with the cleric's movement was needed for the stability of Iraq. He said he had disagreed with L. Paul Bremer III, the former American proconsul, when Mr. Bremer barred Mr. Sadr and some Sunni Arab groups from the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003.

"The delay in getting them to join led to the situation of them becoming violent elements," he said.

"I look at them as part of Iraq's de facto reality, whether some of the individual people are negative or positive," he said. "Anyone who's part of the Iraqi reality should be part of the Iraqi house."

Mr. Jaafari used similar language when laying out his policy toward militias — that inclusion rather than isolation was the proper strategy.

The Iraqi government will try "to meld them, take them, take their names and make them join the army and police forces. And they will respect the army or police rather than the militias."

Recruiting militia members into the Iraqi security forces has not been a problem under the Jaafari government. The issue has been getting those fighters to act as impartial defenders of the state rather than as political partisans. The police forces are stocked with members of the Mahdi Army and the Badr Organization, an Iranian-trained militia, who still exhibit obvious loyalties to their political party leaders.

Police forces have performed poorly when ordered to contain militia violence, such as in the aftermath of the Samarra shrine bombing, and even cruise around in some cities with images of Mr. Sadr or other religious politicians on their squad cars.

There is growing evidence of uniformed death squads operating out of the Shiite-run Interior Ministry, and Ambassador Khalilzad has been lobbying the Iraqis to place nonsectarian people in charge of the Interior and Defense Ministries in the next government. That has caused friction with Shiite leaders. Some have even accused the ambassador of implicitly backing the Sunni-led insurgency.

But Mr. Jaafari said he supported the goal of the Americans.

"We insist that the ministers in the next cabinet, especially the ministers of defense and the interior, shouldn't be connected to any militias, and they should be non-sectarian," he said. "They should be experienced in security work. They should keep the institutions as security institutions, not as political institutions. They should work for the central government."

In the first two years of the war, Mr. Jaafari emerged as one of the most popular politicians in Iraq, especially next to other exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite. A doctor by training and well-versed in the Koran, Mr. Jaafari comes from a prominent family in the Shiite holy city of Karbala. But since taking power last spring, Mr. Jaafari has come under widespread criticism for failing to stamp out the insurgency and promoting hard-line pro-Shiite policies.

So far, the entire Shiite bloc has publicly backed Mr. Jaafari despite the growing opposition to his candidacy. But the alliance could split over this issue. Adel Abdul Mahdi, the American-favored politician who lost to Mr. Jaafari in the secret vote, has hinted he would step forward as a candidate again if he had enough support.

"We don't have a clear answer about what to do," Redha Jowad Taki, a legislator from Mr. Mahdi's party, said of the impasse. "We need to discuss this."

An American diplomat who has been following the political talks said tonight that the Iraqis were moving too slowly and had yet to really debate candidates for the top posts, including that of prime minister. "We want to see them choose someone who can unify the country," he said, "someone who is strong and capable, and will pick strong people for the cabinet."
http://tinyurl.com/n5qhd

Steve, at the session with Phillippe Sands yesterday, you and he raised a crucial question: why the American press has been so timid about criticizing the Iraq War and the Administration's disregard of international institutions, and why all the books we read and discussions we do have no effect on actural policies. Such question arises because we forget that fully half of Americans still very much sopport George W. Bush. We tend to think all Americans by now are appalled by the current U.S. policy, because we hang around with likeminded people to vent our frustrations. In a way, this is a typical "inside the Beltway" syndrome.

I have had chances to go to places like Des Moines, Salt Lake City and Little Rock recently, and were struck by how so many people still firmly support Bush. It's as if it doesn't matter what kind of policy we puusue. They're just not going to attack the sitting president, and they have such a low regard for Democrats that they aren't even going to look at them as an alternative. In Bill Clinton's boyhood home of Hot Springs, Ark., I was taken aback to hear the local newspaper editor say, "Here in Hot Springs, there is not much support of Clingon." She and city officials said essentially that they are ashamed of Clinton.

We are brooding and commiserating among ourselves, and not trying to get our message out to those people. These are not consumers of the New Yorker, New York Review of Books or any of the anti-Bush literature that are featured at New America and other liberal solons in Washington. They watch Fox and read local newspapers that are owned by big media companies, whose Washington bureaus know what kind of hometown audience they are writing for. I feel that even CNN and PBS are increasingly soft on issues, probably because they want to present the "balanced" picture.

So, my conclusion is that we have to get out of our intellectual Washington salons and start devising a strategy to talk sense into the minds of vast number of Americans who live way beyond the Beltway.