Word: cabineted
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...Iraq; in Baghdad. Against a backdrop of violence?more than 250 people have been killed since the new government was announced in late April?al-Jaafari was inaugurated along with 30 other members of his government, although he has yet to permanently fill certain key posts in his Cabinet, including Oil and Defense Ministers. Al-Jaafari faces the tough job of quelling the insurgency and rebuilding the country while a new constitution is drafted for approval...
...five cabinet positions were to have been given to Sunnis, and their absence points to growing fissures in Iraq. The new government is dominated by the Shiite coalition that won January's election, and most of the remaining seats went to the Kurdish parties that finished second with some 27 percent of the vote. The ethnic makeup of the government, in itself, is a revolutionary development, since the Shiite majority and the Kurdish minority have always been marginalized from power in Baghdad - as they have throughout the Arab world - by a Sunni Arab minority that numbers less than 20 percent...
...Conventional wisdom among Iraq's new leaders, and among U.S. officials, is that that bringing on board credible Sunni leaders is the key to defeating the insurgency. Still, even that may be wishful thinking. Reserving five of the 37 cabinet position for Sunni Arabs may be based on an estimation of their proportion of the population, but the Sunni Arabs have ruled Iraq ever since the country was invented by the British in the wake of World War I, and a reluctance to let go of their traditional authority may make many wary of simply submitting to the combination...
...Even more contentious than the number of cabinet positions being offered to Sunnis has been the plan by Jaafari's alliance to oust former Baathists from the security services and deny anyone with a Baathist past a cabinet position. Debaathification has been vigorously opposed by Sunni representatives in negotiations with Jaafari, and the U.S. has also urged the new prime minister to abandon plans for a purge of Baathists from the security services, believing that this could fatally weaken the ability of the Iraqi security forces to fight the insurgency. Jaafari is reportedly backing away from a wholesale purge, recognizing...
...alliance is significantly divided on a number of questions, ranging from the place of Islam in a future constitution to the issue of whether to seek a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. And the halting process by which it has taken three months from election day to seat a partial cabinet is not an encouraging indicator of the prospects for the National Assembly to complete its primary function, drafting a permanent constitution for Iraq, by the August 15 deadline - or even, for that matter, by the fallback date next February...