Iraq's president said Monday he would convene parliament for the first time on March 12, but failed to get one of his two vice presidents to agree — threatening to further delay formation of a new government and raising questions about whether the political process could withstand the unrelenting violence. In a bid to force a showdown in the dispute over the second-term candidacy of the Shiite prime minister, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, announced he would order parliament to convene Sunday for the first time since December elections and ratification of results on February 12. That would have started a 60-day countdown for the legislators to elect a new president and approve the nomination of Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister and sign off on his Cabinet. Talabani was mistakenly counting on the signature of Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite, who lost his own bid for the prime minister's nomination by one vote to Jaafari. Talabani had in hand a power of attorney from the other vice president, Ghazi Yawer, a Sunni, who was out of the country. The Shiite bloc closed ranks and Abdul-Mahdi declined to sign, for the time being at least. In an emergency meeting with Talabani Monday, seven Shiite leaders rejected Talabani's demand for them to abandon Jaafari's nomination.
It remained unclear when parliament might now convene, despite the constitutional directive that set Sunday as the deadline. Nor was it clear how the impasse over Jaafri might be settled. The president had first issued the challenge Wednesday in concert with Sunni Arab and some secular politicians. The oust-Jaafari coalition labelled him a divisive figure in the country's already tattered political landscape. "We want a prime minister who can gather all the political blocs around him, so that the government would be one of national unity," he told reporters in Baghdad around midday Monday.
The Sunni Arab minority blames Jaafari for failing to control the Shiite militiamen who attacked Sunni mosques and clerics after the February 22 shrine bombing in Samarra. Kurds are angry because they believe Jaafari is holding up resolution of their claims to control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Leaders of all Iraq's major political factions scheduled a meeting Tuesday evening in an attempt to untangle the religious and sectarian differences behind the crisis — deeply compounded by continuing violence.
The attacks have served to underscore the dangerous leadership vacuum and the fresh political infighting that has led to the disintegration of many tenuous political bonds that were tethering the country's many religious and ethnic factions. There also were increasing signs of a split in the once united Shiite factions, even though they managed to come together Monday night to reject the move to dump Jaafari.
Nevertheless, anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, whose backing had insured Jaafari's nomination at the Shiite caucus last month, predicted a "quick solution" on approving a government. There were reports that Sadr had threatened to order parliamentarians loyal to him to boycott a Sunday session if Abdul-Mahdi, the Shiite vice president, had signed the Talabani order to convene the legislature. "All obstacles to forming a national unity government soon will be resolved," Sadr said after meeting with Deputy Prime Minister and acting Oil Minister Ahmad Chalabi in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.