Political nuttiness in Iraq sinks even lower

Washington Post:

A group of Iraqi lawmakers linked to anti-U.S. cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called Monday for the dissolution of their country’s parliament and said new elections should be held within six months. 

The move signals a growing rift between Sadr and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — both leading Shiites — and underscores the political uncertainty that has swirled around Baghdad since the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq more than a week ago. 

Just a day after the formal end of the nearly nine-year U.S. effort here, the prime minister’s domestic security forces accused Tariq al-Hashimi, the country’s vice president, who is a Sunni, of running a hit squad, prompting him to flee the capital. The political crisis had been playing out mostly along Shiite-Sunni lines, but Monday’s move by the Sadrists marks the first crack in Maliki’s Shiite coalition since the troop pull-out. 

The political maneuvering came as Baghdad was again rocked by violence. On Monday, a suicide bomber blew up his car outside the main gate of Iraq’s ministry of interior, a compound that houses the domestic security forces, killing at least five people and injuring at least 39, according to government officials. 

At least one of those killed and 14 of the injured were police officers. The rush-hour attack followed a wave of bombings here Thursday. 

Vali Nasr, a Tufts University professor, Iraq expert and author of “The Shia Revival,” said by e-mail that the events are conspiring to form “a complicated mix of inter-Shia bickering and escalation of Shia-Sunni fighting.”

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Sadr is not smart enough to run his on party much less a government, but he is a complete Iranian toady who would be a proxy for the Shia religious bigots who run Iran and would like to make Iraq an annex for their nuttiness.