The warning coincided with a call from Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, for the removal of Maliki and his replacement with a more unifying premier.
Maliki’s 27-member cabinet has been reduced to 20 members by 17 defections by the followers of radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Sunnis, secularists and the Shia Fadilla Party.
Alarmed over these defections, Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani says he is “disgusted” with the Maliki government. Sistani complains that the government, dominated by the Shia alliance which he blessed, has failed to establish security and deliver services to the people. Sistani has a great deal of moral authority with the Shia, Iraq’s largest community.
The assassination of Muhammad Ali Hassani, the governor of Muthanna Province, on Monday was a major blow to Maliki. Hassani’s killing by a roadside bomb was the second such murder of a provincial chief this month. The first to die was Qadisiyah governor Khalil Jamil Hamza. Both men were senior members of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), Maliki’s senior partner in the Shia alliance.
The culprits
The most likely culprits are members of Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia which is locked in a power struggle with SIIC, whose Badr Corps militiamen have been inducted in great numbers into the police and army.
Maliki is also under challenge from within the very Shia parties that put him in power.  Former Premier Ibrahim al-Jaafari of Maliki’s Dawa Party and Adel Abdel Mahdi of SIIC want to topple Maliki and take over.
Maliki’s third rival is interim Premier Ayad Allawi, head of the secular Iraqi National list who poses a different challenge. Allawi seeks to build a non-sectarian majority in parliament with the aim of toppling Maliki and installing a non-sectarian government which will transform the US-imposed communal system into an inclusive, pluralist system.
Since Allawi wants to effect regime change, Washington is likely to reject his programme. The Bush administration is in a hurry to patch up an exit strategy which would enable US troops to depart as soon as the government in Baghdad looks credible.
Bush now understands that this will not happen as long as Maliki, a committed sectarian, is in power. Bush’s problem is that both Jaafari and Abdel Mahdi, Maliki’s Shia fundamentalist alternatives, are also sectarian politicians who depend on the play of sectarian forces to empower them.
14 US SOLDIERS KILLED
Baghdad, reuters: A helicopter crash in northern Iraq on Wednesday killed 14 US soldiers, the US military said, the worst incident of its kind since January 2005.
Also in northern Iraq, at least 20 people were killed when a suicide bomber rammed a fuel tanker into the gates outside a police station in the oil city of Baiji, 180 km north of Baghdad. Another 50 people were wounded.
A US military statement said initial indications suggested the Black Hawk helicopter had suffered mechanical failure, the second incident of its kind in eight days.
“There were no indications of hostile fire,” it said.