Failed Purge?
By The coup that was probably a purge now turns out maybe to have been a failed purge:
Iraq’s interior minister said all 24 of his officers who had been arrested in a security crackdown this week would be released. And in a bold gesture of defiance, he publicly condemned his own government’s investigation, calling the accusations false and motivated purely by politics.
The minister, Jawad al-Bolani, in a series of interviews and at a news conference on Friday, insisted on the innocence of the officials detained on charges of aiding terrorism and having inappropriate ties with political parties, including Al Awda, an illegal party that is a descendant of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
“It’s because of the competition of the provincial elections,” Mr. Bolani, who arrived in the country on Friday after a week away, said of the arrests in an interview. “It’s just electoral propaganda, and that’s playing with fire.”
Regarding my earlier backhanded praise of Maliki’s authoritarian instincts, it doesn’t bode well for him that either a)the coup plotters, or b)the purge victims are now on the street with the apparent full support of the Interior Minister.