Has Iraq Turned the Corner?

The Iraqi leadership deadlock has been broken. The Shiite Dawa party finally shifted to a candidate acceptable to the other factions, Jawad al-Maliki. Financial Times:

Perhaps the biggest challenge in forming the government will be the allocation of the defence and interior ministries, which control Iraq’s security forces. The latter in particular is accused of being a haven for Shia militiamen, some of whom are alleged to have participated in the recent wave of sectarian killings. US diplomats have been adamant Iraq’s next interior minister not have any militia associations. Mr Maliki made militias one of the key points of Saturday’s acceptance speech, declaring that “arms should be in the hand of the government”, and said he would try to implement a law to accelerate “the merging of militias with the armed forces.”

And Condi says we can work with him:

I think the most telling point is that Mr. Maliki was immediately supported by other members of the new government, by the Sunnis and by the Kurds as well as by other members of the Shia coalition, so he obviously has broad support. And while I know that there are going to be questions about what has transpired in the past, clearly the Iraqis are now looking to the future. He did play a role in the constitutional process. I believe we think that he was a useful interlocutor, a constructive interlocutor, and we'll look forward to working with him...

Let me be very clear. We probably won't always agree. We didn't always agree with Prime Minister Jafari. We didn't always agree with Interim Prime Minister Allawi. But this is somebody with whom we can work and we're looking forward to working with him because we think he has the best interests of the Iraqis at heart. He's a hard-working person who wants to see Iraq stable and democratic and he clearly worked hard to convince people in the broad coalition that he is going to take seriously the concept of a government of national unity and not a government that would be sectarian but one that will be a government of national unity.

So I think all of those attributes really do serve him well and he's obviously somebody who is very courageous and brave because he also, like many of these people, he stood up to Saddam Hussein at considerable cost to himself.