Ambassador Hill to Iraq officials: 'Get this show on the road'

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Source: Washington Post

BAGHDAD -- U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill on Monday expressed deep concern about how slowly Iraqi officials have moved to seat a new government, saying they need to "get this show on the road."

American officials see the formation of a new government and a smooth transition of power as crucial precursors to the scheduled drawdown of all but 50,000 troops by the end of August. Hill's unusually blunt comments reflect growing U.S. anxiety with a process that has been slowed by a host of factors, including the close results from the March 7 parliamentary election, a recently ordered manual recount of the roughly 2.4 million ballots cast in Baghdad and ongoing efforts to disqualify candidates for alleged sympathies to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

"Obviously one would like to see them pick up the pace," Hill told journalists at the U.S. Embassy on Monday evening. "While we always knew this was going to be a tough period, we are approaching almost seven weeks" since the vote.

more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/26/AR2010042602769.html

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Will the Pentagon withdrawal ALL of our combat forces without a government in place? They have four months to get their act together, yet the violence and divisions worsen each week.

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1. US expresses first concerns over Iraq election results

Iraqi election authorities on Monday announced the disqualification of two winning parliamentary candidates because of alleged Baathist ties while the US said publicly for the first time it was concerned about delays in forming a new Iraqi government.

“We have an election that took place on March 7. We are now approaching the two-month period and we are concerned that the process is lagging,” Ambassador Chris Hill said Monday in the first public indication of concern by the US government over elections seen as crucial to stability.

“We have not gone on to government formation as of yet and we share the concern of those who believe that its time that the politicians got down to business and started forming a government,” he said at a briefing for Western journalists.
52 candidates declared ineligible

Iraq election officials on Monday said they had been instructed by a review panel that it was upholding a decision by the Justice and Accountability commission that 52 candidates in the parliamentary elections had been deemed ineligible to have run, including at least one Sunni candidate belonging to the Iraqiya coalition, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s major challenger.

“The decision is to disqualify 52 candidates, set aside all the votes they won in the elections and to rule out the winning candidates,” says Ali Faisal al-Lami, executive director of the controversial Justice and Accountability Commission.

He says the disqualified candidates include two who won parliamentary seats in the March 7 vote. Of the disqualified candidates, 22 of the 52 are from the Iraqiya list led by secular Shiite political Ayad Allawi, which has a narrow lead over Maliki’s party. One of the winning politicians, Ibrahim al-Mutlak, is the brother of prominent Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlak, who was disqualified – for alleged Baathist ties – by the commission before the vote. The disqualification at the time threatened to derail the election process, which for the first time included substantial Sunni representation.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2010/0426/US-expresses-first-concerns-over-Iraq-election-results