3 of 5 top Iraqi Gov positions are council members

[mburbank]

So we hand picked the governing council and now the interim government we're going to hand 'sovereighnity' to has three top jobs going to former council members.

Hmmm. That should be credible to the people of Iraq. No problem there.

I thought the UN was supposed to be picking these folks. So far we're hearing a lot about who we wanted, and who the US hand picked governing council wanted and the conflicts between us and the people we hand picked.

[Cosmo Electrolux]

they need people who will suck republican cock and not complain about it. Oh, and give the US all of their oil for free...

[mburbank]

Even more, they need people who won't immediately ask us to leave. I don't think even picking the players guarantees that.

If they publicly ask us to go, we're screwed. We can't really say yes, and if we say no, then we've demonstrated they don't have sovereighnity. We'd be forced to say we won't leave until until a democratically elected government tells us to (and we'd have a hard time doing it even then).

But how will a government headed by people we picked be able to demonstrate legitimacy to the Iraqi people short of asking us to leave?

[mburbank]

" Iraqis have a strong sense of irony — every discussion about politics or economics in this country seems to begin with a sardonic or mordant observation: Isn't it odd that a nation with the world's second-largest oil reserves should also have mile-long queues at gas stations? Isn't it strange that the Americans, who made such a big deal of Saddam Hussein's treatment of prisoners, brutalized their own Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib? And so on.

So, it was entirely appropriate that discussion over the appointment of Iraq's new interim government was laced with its own special irony: The two men at the top of the list announced Tuesday were just last month ranked bottom of a list of potential leaders — by their own countrymen.

A poll conducted in May by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies (ICRSS) asked Iraqis to rank 17 prominent religious and political leaders. Iyad Allawi, Prime Minister of the interim government that will take over administrative power from the Coalition Provisional Authority on June 30, finished in sixteenth place. Behind him, dead last, came Ghazi al-Yawer, who on Tuesday was named president of the interim government. "

-Time Magazine