Nuri al-Maliki moves to consolidate power as the U.S. begins heading for the exits:
Up to 35 officials in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior ranking as high as general have been arrested over the past three days with some of them accused of quietly working to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, according to senior security officials in Baghdad.
The arrests, confirmed by officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security as well as the prime minister’s office, included four generals. The officials also said that the arrests had come at the hand of an elite counterterrorism force that reports directly to the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
Maybe I’m just cynical, but this “elite counterterrorism force” sounds to me like a security organization whose primary purpose has more to do with bolstering Maliki vis-à-vis internal enemies than with counterterrorism as such. Not that I blame him, all kinds of other factions have their own armed wings and no loyalty to Maliki or the Iraqi state, so to stay in office he’ll need friends with guns of his own.
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