Iraq's prime minister grabs control

It was a good day for Iraq’s new prime minister. Not only did he announce the death of the country’s most-feared terror leader, he also won approval for new security ministers, the men charged with stopping the violence in Iraq.

With that rapid series of breakthroughs, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki firmly established his control, setting the stage for what he pledges will be a sharp crackdown to restore order.

US officials seemed overjoyed, keenly aware that their ability to trim the number of US troops depends on his success.

The three posts that Maliki named today are crucial to that effort: the defence minister to run the army, the interior minister to run the national police and the national security minister to advise the prime minister.

The posts had been deadlocked for weeks, because of squabbling among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But they were quickly approved by parliament today just minutes after Maliki announced the death of terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

US military officials and Iraqi officials said the timing was coincidental, and indeed Iraqi political leaders said the final agreement on the names had come late yesterday, before the news of al-Zarqawi’s death was known.

If anything, that made the achievement even more impressive.

In the end, Maliki, widely viewed as a pragmatist, apparently was able to break the Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish logjam over the posts by picking technocrats, less likely to aggravate either old Saddam Hussein-era prejudices or the country’s virulent new sectarian divides.

The interior ministry was the hottest button. Sunnis had accused the previous interior minister, a Shiite, of allowing Shiite death squads to operate from inside his ministry, and were determined to get a more neutral figure this time.

The new interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, is also a Shiite but, as an independent member of the dominant Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, is considered so neutral that no Sunnis objected to his name.

Almost unknown, he said he had worked as an engineer in the Iraqi air force until 1999.

The new defence minister, Iraqi Army General Abdul-Qader Mohammed Jassim al-Mifarji, is a Sunni Arab not affiliated with any party. He was thrown out of the military and Saddam’s Baath party in 1991 after he criticised the invasion of Kuwait and was given a seven-year prison term, he said.

“As a defence minister I will work for all Iraqis and will not work according to my tribal, religious and ethnic background,” he said after he was named.

The new national security minister, Sherwan al-Waili, who will advise the prime minister on security matters, is also a Shiite but considered neutral.

With those three key cabinet posts now filled, Maliki can presumably turn to the still-overwhelming tasks ahead, including reining in militias and getting Iraqi forces trained and cohesive enough to slowly take over from the US military.

For an Iraqi public that craves security, that would be good news. Maliki’s announcement of the death of al-Zarqawi could create a huge pool of good will and support, just the kind of thing he needs to take on other difficult security tasks like shutting down militias.

Yet despite today’s success, no one expects the way to be easy for Maliki, a veteran insider in Iraq’s oldest Shiite political party who spent years in exile after being sentenced to death by Saddam’s regime.

While his more pragmatic stance may have helped break the cabinet logjam, Maliki still will need much help from both his fellow Iraqis and other Arabs, all working to “take advantage of the gap left behind by al-Zarqawi to gain back his followers”, said one political analyst, Mohammed El-Sayed of the Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies in Cairo.

Today’s events just made it clear he’s bound and determined to jump in and try.