Patrick Poole Runs Down All The World's Woes

Via Instapundit, PJM's Patrick Poole takes you through a tour of all the Hells broken out on earth.

Here's how he describes the coup in Iraq:

Last night Prime Minister Maliki gave a speech accusing new President Fuad Masum of violating the constitution as Golden Dawn militias backing Maliki took up strategic positions around Baghdad, including the Green Zone, in an all-out coup. Remarkably, Maliki is accusing Masum of a coup. Maliki’s issue with Masum is that the new president has not selected Maliki for a third term as prime minister.

Maliki is therefore justifying his own coup by accusing Masum (a Kurd, incidentally) of having first staged his own coup.

Maliki claims that by not nominating him as President, Masum is guilty of a "clear constitutional violation."

"This attitude represents a coup on the constitution and the political process in a country that is governed by a democratic and federal system," Mr. al-Maliki said in a surprise address on Iraqi TV.

"The deliberate violation of the constitution by the president will have grave consequences on the unity, the sovereignty, and the independence of Iraq and the entry of the political process into a dark tunnel," he said.

Mr. al-Maliki’s party won the largest share of seats in the parliament and said the president should have appointed a prime minister from that bloc by now.

Maliki's theory, then, is that the Iraq constitution requires the President to name as Prime Minister someone from the party that won the most votes in the parliamentary election. However, I haven't found anyone reporting that the constitution actually says that.

Further, it should be noted that Maliki's party did not win a majority of parliamentary seats -- a plurality, yes, a majority, no.

Oh, and by the way, Masum did nominate someone from Maliki's party for PM, the NYT says.

Apparently Maliki specifically demands he, and only he, can be PM.

The nomination of Haider al-Abadi, who is a member of Mr. Maliki’s Shiite Islamist Dawa Party, came hours after a dramatic late-night television appearance in which a defiant Mr. Maliki challenged the Iraqi president, Fuad Masum, and threatened legal action for not choosing him as the nominee.

As he spoke in the middle of the night, extra security forces, including special forces units loyal to Mr. Maliki, as well as tanks, locked down the fortified Green Zone of government buildings and took up positions around the city. Soldiers manned numerous checkpoints on Monday and were numerous in the Green Zone, and the atmosphere in the capital was tense.

posted by Ace at 03:01 PM

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