the new alliance

considering how important the iraq internal political process is to the "success" of the surge, it is remarkable just how little coverage it gets here. political maneuvering can be difficult to follow in any country, even moreso when people have strange names and when the public is unfamiliar with the various faction and personalities involved. but still, thousands of american lives are now at risk to create the opportunity for iraqis to reach political reconciliation. you'd think that would generate a lot of attention in the u.s. on how that process is going.

but it isn't. and the little coverage it does get, i think, can be really misleading. check out the lede of this NYT article:

Emergency workers continued Thursday to pull bodies from the rubble of a quadruple truck bombing in two villages near the Syrian border as Iraq’s prime minister, a Shiite, and its president, a Kurd, announced a new alliance of moderates in Parliament.

a new alliance! that sounds like progress. but it's not. at least not progress towards any form of political reconciliation. the "new alliance" is essentially the "old alliance", the old coalition that made up the government, except with sunni arab parties excluded.

the times article later acknowledges, in a backhanded sort of way, that there might be some disadvantages to this "new alliance":

But the impact of the deal could be limited. If the entire Shiite bloc of 130 seats goes along with the agreement, the new Shiite-Kurdish alliance would control 181 of Parliament’s 275 seats, enough to pass legislation. It remains unclear, however, whether the Fadhila Party and the party loyal to Moktada al-Sadr — the Shiite parties that have been some of Mr. Maliki’s most vocal critics — would sign on when laws came up for a vote.

in other words, this brave new coalition government doesn't have the votes to actually govern. that is, unless it is joined by the sadrists and fadhila party. there seems to be a law here in the u.s. that any article mentioning sadr use the words "radical" and "cleric", so how exactly can this new alliance be called "moderate" in the lede if it requires a "radical" to function?

but the times article continues:

A senior American official in Baghdad, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject, said that any alliance leaving out Sunnis would also lack the credibility needed for real reconciliation among the country’s three main factions, Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

so i guess this "new alliance of moderates" will "lack the credibility needed for real reconciliation." is that really anything to crow about?

the "alliance" announced yesterday was a major setback for political reconciliation in iraq. what seems to have happened is that the iraqi government tried to make a new coalition and failed miserably. they lost members of their governing coalition and failed to bring in anyone new as would be required for real reconciliation. but then, like all politicians, they tried their best to spin the mess into something good. that's to be expected. that's what politicians do. the problem is when the press buries the lede behind a fog of political spin.