The fact that almost a third of the 274 assembly members were absent from the vote on the new government spoke for the insurgents' power.
Last Wednesday, rebel death threats against the legislators culminated in the killing of Sheikha Lameah Khaddouri, a legislator for Allawi's party, who was shot repeatedly in the face and chest. One of 89 women in the parliament, she was its first member to die.
For the 150,000 US troops in Iraq, the new government brings reassurance in the statements by Jaafari and other Shiite leaders about the US' role. The Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, were fiercely anti-American during their exile years under Saddam, and Dawa was implicated by US intelligence in terrorist acts across the Middle East, including a 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Kuwait.
But Jaafari and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the SCIRI leader, have said Iraq will need US forces until its new army and paramilitary police can take over the war. Many in the new government admit that this could take until well into the mandate of the permanent government due to take office early next year, even longer. Accordingly, Iraqi politicians say, the new government's emphasis is likely to lie on the need for an agreement with Washington that will give Baghdad legal authority when the UN mandate for the US military presence expires at the end of the year.
US concerns focus on the demand by the Shiite religious parties, SCIRI in particular, for a purge of high-ranking Baathists from command-level positions in the army, police and intelligence. The US$5.7-billion US drive to rebuild the Iraqi forces in the past year has involved a wholesale retreat from the "de-Baathification" rules set after the invasion, and the recruitment of scores of Sunnis who served under Saddam.
US diplomats say they played only a broker's role in the formation of the new government, concentrating on overcoming the political in-fighting that delayed agreement so long that a new wave of popular disenchantment -- and a fresh upsurge in insurgent attacks -- began to dissipate the political momentum fostered when 8.5 million Iraqis defied insurgent threats to vote in January.
But the diplomats say they have been emphatic that there should be no purge of the Iraqi security forces just as Iraqi troops have begun to make their weight felt in the war.
The US has said that only Baathists implicated in Saddam's atrocities should be barred. But they got a blunt rebuttal at Thursday's parliamentary session, dominated not by the quiet, apologetic Jaafari, but by the charismatic Hakim. The SCIRI leader, in the black turban and cloak of a devout Shiite, has stayed out of the new government. But signaling the powerful behind-the-scenes role he is expected to claim, he denounced any move to "hand over the country's assets to our enemies," and insisted the new government "de-Baathify Saddam's terrorists from all state institutions."
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