Iraqi Parties Break Deadlock on Candidates

I expected that, after Sunday’s artful compromise on a Sunni speaker for the National Assembly, the pieces of the next Iraqi government would quickly fall into place. And so they have.

The major political parties of Iraq agreed Tuesday evening to appoint a president and two vice presidents at a meeting of the national assembly on Wednesday, breaking a two-month deadlock and taking the first significant step in forming a new government.

The presidency council will have two weeks from its appointment to name a prime minister, who will select a cabinet. The new government would then have to be approved by a majority vote of the assembly, according to the interim constitution.

The main Shiite and Kurdish political blocs have agreed to name Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, as president; Adel Abdul Mehdi, a prominent Shiite Arab politician as one vice president; and Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, the Sunni Arab president of the interim government, as the other vice president, said Hussein al-Shahristani, a vice speaker of the assembly.

The agreement breaks an enormous impasse between the main parties that had threatened to destroy the confidence built up during the Jan. 30 elections, when Iraqis defied insurgent threats to walk in droves to polling stations.

A two-thirds vote by the 275-member assembly is required to install the presidency council, and so the Shiite and Kurdish blocs, which together can meet the two-thirds requirement, haggled for weeks over a range of issues, from control of oil revenues to the role of Islam in the new government.

[…]

Shahristani, a nuclear physicist and prominent member of the Shiite bloc, said the presidency council could officially appoint the prime minister as soon as late Wednesday or Thursday. The leading candidate for that job is Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the head of the Dawa Islamic Party, a religious Shiite party.

A government of the Iraqi people, by the Iraqi people, and for the future of the Iraqi people and, quite possibly, all of the people of the global community.

Gee, no pressure there.