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After an election that failed to produce a clear winner, Iraq's political leaders are squaring up for a fight that could have dire consequences for the country's security situation. Last week's media reports hailing Iyad Allawi as the election victor were a little premature: the former U.S.-installed Prime Minister's secular nationalist slate may have finished narrowly ahead of its nearest rival, but its share of the vote translates into only 91 seats in the 325-seat legislature, where 163 seats is the magic number needed to form a government. And while Allawi's first-place...
...Maliki did send a delegation to the Iranian city of Qum last weekend to seek the backing of Iraqi Shi'ite firebrand cleric al-Sadr, whose supporters are the largest and most influential element within the INA. Indeed, with some 40 seats won by his followers, al-Sadr has emerged as a potential kingmaker. His enmity toward al-Maliki is well established, however, especially since al-Maliki unleashed the Iraqi military on al-Sadr's supporters in Basra in 2008. Al-Sadr has warned that he would veto a second term for al-Maliki, and so the Prime Minister...
...Rossia 1 broadcast a short news report about an hour after the bombers struck, followed by a documentary about a famous folk singer and a police drama. NTV, which was once the benchmark for Russian television journalism and is now controlled by the state-owned gas giant Gazprom, was last to report on the bombings at 10 a.m. - a full two hours after the first blast. The story came "as soon as [the channel] had video footage from the scene of the tragedy," network spokeswoman Maria Bezborodova said in an e-mail. NTV's report was preceded by a cooking...
...flew into Marjah over a patchwork of poppy fields - not exactly a sea of poppies, but plenty of them. It was two weeks before the harvest, and the last blossoms were floating away in the dusty haze of Helmand province, leaving the prohibitively weird-looking, blue-gray bulbs bald and ready for processing, like an army of alien vegetative creatures. We landed in a wheat field just across the road from the district governor's pathetic headquarters. It was Day 45 after the operation to retrieve Marjah from the Taliban had begun, and the highest-ranking U.S. military official, Admiral...
...senior U.S. official said, adding that he expected to be in a significantly stronger position within four months. The more wary military officers were worried about moving too quickly ahead of the Afghan government's capabilities. One called it "rushing to failure." Another called it "catastrophic success," a term last used after U.S. forces reached Baghdad in three weeks and had absolutely no idea how to control what they'd won. (Read "Afghan Opium: To Crack Down...