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...latest version of Maliki will be put to the test on Jan. 31, when Iraqis vote in provincial elections. If the Dawa Party - now a junior partner in the Shi'ite coalition - makes big gains, it will be seen as an endorsement of the Prime Minister. Dawa officials have been playing up Maliki's tough-guy credentials, depicting him as the man who forced a reluctant U.S. to accept a withdrawal deadline...
...need to end Iraq's destructive sectarian politics. But at the polls, Iraqis have shown little appetite for tough guys, preferring to vote for diffuse coalitions of parties with little in common beyond sectarian identity. The cautionary tale for Maliki is Iyad Allawi, the country's first post-Saddam Prime Minister: he, too, portrayed himself as a strongman, but his secular coalition won barely 14% of the vote. "Maliki will go the same way as Allawi," says Abdel-Bari al-Zebari, a Kurdish MP. "Iraqis know that a strongman is not in their best interests...
...powerful Maliki be good for the U.S.? The withdrawal deal served the interests of Barack Obama last year; both he and Maliki wanted a firm timetable, whereas President Bush opposed the idea. Officials close to Maliki say he was impressed with Obama when they met last summer. But the Prime Minister is no fan of the new U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Two years ago she expressed concerns about Maliki's sectarian sensibilities and called on the Iraqi parliament to replace him with a "less divisive and more unifying figure." Furious, Maliki said that Democrats such as Clinton were...
...Moreover, there is a strong geopolitical argument for dropping the embargo: the re-emergence of the Russian Federation as a global power. Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has made restoring a close strategic relationship with Cuba a priority in Moscow. This alone should be more than enough evidence that the embargo is counterproductive. In 1962, the world watched with bated breath as Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off in the Caribbean, and many historians today recognize that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest that the world had ever come to nuclear holocaust...
...housing stock took a hammering in the hostilities. Initial estimates of the Public Works Ministry point to more than 2,100 houses destroyed and another 45,000 left in need of major repairs. A key sewage plant, whose construction with international funding had the backing of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was also hit, causing nearly $200 million in damages. Maintenance experts say a crumbling wall around a sewage lake is now in danger of spilling tons of fetid waste into the streets and alleys of northern Gaza...