Bush presses Iraqi PM to resign

With public disapproval ratings not seen since the days of Richard M. Nixon and crucial mid-term elections quickly approaching, the Bush administration is seeking to deflect responsibility for political chaos in Iraq by blaming elected Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. This past week Bush informed the fledgling Iraqi government that the US would not accept Jaafari's leadership and demanded that Iraqis speed up the process of getting their democracy off the ground. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw were urgently dispatched to Baghdad to warn the Iraqis in the most forceful terms that they were losing patience with the country's beleaguered efforts to foment a sovereign democracy. Rice questioned Jafari's leadership, telling reporters that "in the [two months] since his nomination... he's not been able" to put together a government. Jaafari is refusing to abandon his second term and is insisting he will continue to carry out his duties. "I heard their points of view even though I disagree with them," Jaafari said, referring to Rice and Straw's arm-twisting visit. "There is a decision that was reached by a democratic mechanism and I stand with it.... We have to protect democracy in Iraq and it is democracy which should decide who leads Iraq," he said. Tampering with democracy was risky, he insisted. "People will react if they see the rules of democracy being disobeyed," he warned. On Apr. 4, after a meeting with Straw and Rice, Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi met with Jaafari and urged him to give up his second term. Mahdi lost the prime minister nomination to Jaafari in February by a single vote at a caucus of the Shiite bloc, which won the most seats in parliamentary elections last December. Officials in Washington believe it could be advantageous if Mahdi, a Western-educated proponent of free market economics, got the job. Mahdi's boss, Shiite cleric Abdelaziz Hakim, would presumably have to give up the Interior Ministry posts he now controls. Hakim's followers have allegedly allowed the ministry to engage in extrajudicial killings and run secret torture chambers that have become a focal point of the sectarian tension. The day after Mahdi asked Jaafari to step down, Bush urged Iraqis to speed up talks on forming their new government, calling on elected leaders "to stand up and do their job." Despite the complaints, Iraqi leaders have for now shelved talks on forming a government. Splits have appeared in the dominant conservative Shiite grouping, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), over whether Jaafari should lead the new government. Iraq's dominant Shiite political bloc fractured on Apr. 2 when its most powerful faction publicly demanded that the prime minister resign over his inability to form a unified government. The fracturing of the Shiites became clear as the leading Shiite party, Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), said they were putting forward another candidate to replace Jaafari. Jaafari was nominated for a full four-year term in February by a Shiite bloc that holds 130 of the parliament's 275 seats. The sudden focus on Jaafari's leadership came after relations between Shiite leaders and the US had been fraying for months, and had reached a crisis point after a bloody assault on a Shiite mosque on Mar. 26 by US and Iraqi forces which killed at least 20 people. The following day, the UIA had condemned the US for the raid and said it was dropping out of the US-guided talks aimed at forming a unity government. The raid also widened a split between the Sunni-led Defense Ministry, which oversees the Iraqi troops who took part in the operation, and the Shiite-dominated police force. Rivalry between the two security forces has fueled apprehension that the sectarian violence could drag them into a civil war. Weeks of intense negotiations to form a government with the Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular blocs elected to Parliament in December came to a halt, as Shiite representatives failed to show up for the talks. Baghdad's governor, Hussein Tahan, a member of SCIRI, had announced that local officials were ending all contacts with the US in protest of the killings. That shocking statement was followed the next day with senior SCIRI-affiliated politicians suddenly announcing that US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told them to inform Jaafari that Bush did not want him to remain the country's leader. Khalilzad said that Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Jaafari. Haider al-Ubady, a spokesman for Jaafari, accused the US of trying to subvert Iraqi sovereignty and weaken the Shiite ranks. "How can they do this?" Ubady said. "An ambassador telling a sovereign country what to do is unacceptable."