When a war starts going south, there is usually a lot of passing the buck, from Interior Ministry to Defense Ministry to the head of state. The bad news for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is that he is all of the above.
For the past four years, Maliki has personally and continually held every single government ministry responsible for any troops or other security forces. Now, as his troops are routed time and again by al-Qaeda and a good chunk of the country has been lost, his obsession with centralization has put him in a precarious position.
There is no cabinet to reshuffle, and there are no ministers to fire. Maliki’s back is against the wall, and officials are blasting him for long-standing security failures, which at this point are adding up to a loss of a lot of territory.
Maliki’s instinctive response is to try to centralize even more, seeking “emergency powers” to cope with the situation. He’s not getting them, though, as major boycotts in parliament left him unable to call a quorum to even put the issue to a vote, and opposition figures, who have long accused Maliki of having dictatorial designs, see giving him such powers as incredibly dangerous.
The (buck) should stop at Bush and the neocons who created this disaster.
Everything the Bush regime said about Saddam possessing WMDs was a lie.
Regime Change was the agenda. Iraq is another USG (failed) state, and an
example of Obozo's ridiculous statement, 'might doing right'.
Absolutely right.
It's a coin toss – whether Maliki asks for asylum from the US or Iran. Both countries would do well to point him in the direction of the previously used rathole in ad-Dawr.
Honestly? The buck stops with George Bush's cabal of NeoCons and the whores in the press who made the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of its state seem like a good idea.