In Iraq, Violence Falls but Political Gridlock Remains

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• GWEN IFILL:

  By nearly every measure, the level of violence in Iraq seems to be on the decline, for now. But what has become of the next hurdle, the plan to put a working government in place? For that, we turn to two experts who have been keeping track of what has turned into a long-running political stalemate in Baghdad.

  Feisal Istrabadi served as Iraq's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations until this fall. He's now a visiting professor of law at Indiana University in Bloomington. And Juan Cole is a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

  Welcome to you both.

  Mr. Istrabadi, so we have heard that the violence is down. The U.S. military says it's down 55 percent since last June. What happened to the political piece?

• FEISAL ISTRABADI, Indiana University, Bloomington:

  Well, the political piece is a very complicated part of this. There has been very little progress, I'm sorry to say, on some of the large political compromises.

  Fundamentally, there are parties whose bases were sectarian and ethnic groupings, and rather than as sort of pan-Iraqi agenda. These were the parties that were elected into the parliament. These parties have found it very difficult to make compromises on fundamental issues, although I still am hopeful that the existence of this sort of space, which the surge seems to have managed very effectively to make, will allow for the kind of compromises that I think need to be made.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Juan Cole, we heard today of this brewing feud which seems to have erupted between Prime Minister Maliki and Vice President Hashimi. Is that an example of what Feisal Istrabadi is talking about?

  JUAN COLE, University of Michigan: It's so discouraging that these high Iraqi officials who are presiding over a country that really is broken, which has millions of pressing problems, are behaving like kindergartners.

  First, al-Maliki last spring wouldn't meet with his vice president, who's from the Sunni fundamentalist party, Tariq Al-Hashimi. They couldn't find time for each other, and then al-Hashimi got in a snit about that and his party withdrew from the government, so it's not a national unity government anymore.

  And now Maliki is saying al-Hashimi is not — as vice president, he has the responsibility of signing off on legislation, that there are 26 bills with him that he's refusing to sign off on. So they're blaming the stagnation on one another. They're absolutely refusing to compromise with one other.

  Al-Maliki, when the Sunni parties withdrew from his cabinet, instead of going to them and saying, "What do you want? How could I bring you back in? What compromises are necessary here?" Al-Maliki fired them, basically, said they were absentee cabinet members, because they had resigned and refused to come to their offices. And this denies them their pensions and other prerogatives. So the whole thing seems to be very petty.