Well, I'd like to say he was spinning in his grave, but it's a bit too soon for that.
The latest from Iraq is the phenomenal news that they've finally ironed out their differences and come up with a government. And the outcome is about as good as anyone could have hoped for - in some ways freakishly better than anyone expected.
Rather than fighting over control of the presidency of the National Assembly, the two main Arab factions - Sunni and Shiite - decided instead to pick a president from the third and smaller faction, the Kurds. The AP reports that an agreement was reached yesterday and that agreement was infact voted on and approved today to make Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani president and Shiite Adel Abdul-Mahdi along with Sunni Ghazi al-Yawer the two vice presidents called for by their current system. Shiite politician Ibrahim al Jafari from the moderately religious Dawa party will be the new Prime Minister, so the Shiites get a slight edge in the major offices commensurate with their 48% support in the recent election. There's a really good, comprehensive article on the leaderhsip vote available from Radio Free Europe, with lots of quotes from Talabani. (I need to pay more attention to RFE as a news source, the depth of the reporting in this article and others I've seen recently blows away the regular news services.)
Given the years Saddam spent murdering Kurds this seems like bizarrely ironic justice. And it's a surprising acknowledgement by the Arab factions of the fact that the Kurds are the group which is the most organized, most unified and most experienced at actually running a government, since they've basically been running Kurdistan as if it were an independent nation since the first Iraq war when Saddam essentially lost control over the province.
This seems to have come to pass because the Kurds basically refused to side with either faction making it impossible to reach a majority unless they were given huge, even ridiculous concessions. At one point they were insisting that they should get to keep their private army, but that all of its expenses should be paid by taxes collected in Baghdad. The alternative, apparently, was to give them the presidency and thus get them to fully integrate into the new government. The presidency has limited power, but is a position of prominence and influence, essentially the voice of the nation.
Article comments
1 - Dave Nalle
A quickie update to this post. Apparently the Turks are good at poker. The Chinese site Xinhuanet has a brief but interesting article with quotes from Turkey's foreign minister Abdullah Gul who seems to be all happy with the choice of Talabani to head the Iraqi government. We'll see how long that lasts.
To his credit, Talabani has never been outspoken in favor of unifying Kurdistan, but the Turks have always given him the cold shoulder in the past. They really don't like the idea of strong Kurdish leadership on their borders.
Dave
2 - Temple Stark
You can do updates in the post Dave. It's not archived yet.
3 - Dave Nalle
Good point, Temp. I just don't always know how to fit additional material into the flow of the original article. It would have been easier with this one than with most of my articles, but I usually try to write my articles as a coherent whole and it's easier to add a bit of additional information on as a comment than to rewrite to accomodate something marginal.
Dave
4 - Dave Nalle
As a followup, to make this even worse, they forced Saddam to watch the election on TV in his cell by order of the interim government. Sweet irony.
Dave