Even more good news for Maliki

You got that? The US is trying to undo all of Bremer's good work now, and Maliki and al Sadr are in cahoots to prevent it.

DAMASCUS - On Sunday, the Iraqi Parliament debated a draft bill granting permission to 14,000 former Ba'athists, all being from the Sunni community, to rejoin government jobs and the armed forces. All of them had been fired in 2003 in a ill-advised process called de-Ba'athification, engineered by US proconsul L Paul Bremer and the United States' number one man in Iraq at the time, Ahmad Chalabi.

Reconciliation with the Sunnis is a demand put forward by Sunni notables and the former US ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad. It has been echoed at the highest level by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and US President George W Bush. The Americans believe that unless the Sunnis take part in government, they will never share in the rebuilding of Iraq, nor will they shoulder responsibility for its security. Only when given their former role in government and society (minus the presidency), would they work for a stable Iraq and successful political process, seeing it as an extension of their own success, stability and continuity.

Additionally, the Americans realize that all of their major allies in the Arab world (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan and Qatar) are Sunni states which will not stand by and watch Iraqi Sunnis being crushed by the Shi'ites and Kurds. Not everybody in Iraq, however, shares in the US's enthusiasm for cooperation with the former Ba'athists, who total 1.4 million.

The new proposal says that members of the former security services and Republican Guards will be entitled to their pensions, while ordinary partisans will be reinstated to their jobs and considered eligible to run for any office, including prime minister, speaker of Parliament, or president, if voted for by the Iraqi people.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK27Ak03.html