Month: May 2022

MntGoat posted today but the old link doesn’t get you to the newest post anymore. She’s added a new “page” under her domain. Here’s the new link.

I can see by the surge in visitors to this site that MntGoat hasn’t posted in a few days. Her blog is here. In years past early May has seen her very busy with personal and community/cultural affairs; I imagine that is the case this year as Covid restrictions are lessened.

The election drama continues with al-Sadr maintaining his strong stand against the Coordination Framework (CF) and Nori al-Maliki. This is a fascinating development in Iraqi politics where the “majority” Shiites are themselves fractured and do not represent a single bloc. After the Sadr coalition was blocked from nominating a Prime Minister by Maliki’s quorum-based tactics, al-Sadr threw down the gauntlet by giving CF 40 days during Ramadan to try to establish a majority government themselves with no interference from Sadr. CF has failed because those aligned with Sadr (a broad coalition across Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite MPs) have remained committed to Sadr’s “Iraq for Iraqis” agenda (as opposed to CF’s “Iraq for Iran and Shiites, and we’ll throw you others a bone”). I have read that after the 40 days expires this week, al-Sadr next calls upon the “Independent Ministers” (mostly Kurds and Sunnis) to form a majority-bloc in Parliament — this really means to align with either Sadr or CF in such numbers that the bloc represents 2/3 plus one of the Parliament (they need a full 2/3 to make the quorum required to nominate the PM).

The formation of the Iraqi government by constitutional means is certainly a primary obstacle to any movement to re-instate the dinar. Only after this ‘stability’ and ‘security’ milestone is attained can the PTB, including the CBI, seriously push for the re-instatement.

The next major impediment IMHO is Iraq’s failure to fully resolve the Kurdish question. We all know the Constitution and the Law says that Kurdish oil is Iraq’s oil, but the Kurds have continued to operate their oil fields as if they are an independent Kurdish state rather than a region of Iraqi citizens. Iraq since 2003 has treated Kurdistan both ways as it has been convenient to do so, plus Iraq has repeatedly failed to implement article 140. Iraq must fully resolve the constitutional issues of Kurdistan and Kurdish oil.