Well now, this is interesting. If the United States has no business worrying about the disintegration of Iraqi democracy, then perhaps our ineffectual "broker" role in the Palestinian kind ought to be likewise retired. Can I get a side order of benchmarks with my roadmap? In political terms, Ramallah looks unenviably worse than Baghdad these days:
Hamas legislators, who won a majority of seats in the most recent parliamentary election in January 2006, stayed away from today’s session and said it was illegal. Salah al-Bardawil, a Hamas legislator, said in Gaza that convening the legislature “without arrangements with the biggest bloc, and with the Israeli arrest of Hamas legislators, was an attack on Palestinian legitimacy.”
The Sadrist bloc is not boycotting Iraq's legislature. What is it doing? Preparing a piece of legislation that propose withdrawing confidence in the Maliki administration:
As reported earlier Monday, the Iraqi Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi has said that he would support a vote of no-confidence against Maliki if it were offered by a bloc other than the Tawafuq Front.
Hashemi is leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest of the three parties that make up the Tawafuq Front, the largest Sunni Arab bloc in Parliament.