From The Huffington Post
By Tom Hayden

A peaceful coup is being attempted in Baghdad, seeking to replace Nouri al-Maliki with a coalition between the Sunni political leader Saleh al-Mutlak and the Shiite insurgent leader Moqtada al-Sadr.

In the background are calls from Iraq’s leading Shiite and Sunni clerics for an American withdrawal timetable.

Al-Mutlak, an ex-Baathist who heads the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue has eleven seats in parliament which, combined with Sadr’s twenty percent bloc, is enough to destabilize or even bring down the regime of al-Maliki.

As reported last week in the Huntington Post, secret efforts to strike a deal with the Sunni nationalist resistance have been underway for months. Ex-Baathists like Mutlak, Sunnis in the Muslim Scholars Association, and in particular the revered Sunni cleric Harith al-Dhari, are strongly supportive of a political settlement based on a US withdrawal timetable. But the sudden move by al-Sadr’s Shiite bloc, which pulled out of the Baghdad government over al-Maliki’s meeting with Bush, provides the anti-occupation coalition with significant, perhaps decisive, power, if they choose to bring down al-Maliki’s shaky coalition.

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