Jaafari has agreed to submit to a revote

This could be a really big deal, we'll have to wait and see if the politics actually match the rhetoric, but what caught my eye was the reporting of the mechanism by which this was brought about.

The AP, Reuters, NYTimes, and I'm sure others, all report this shift in position only in the context of Bush's "forceful statements" yesterday. But Bush has been making "forceful statements" for three months, so what really changed. Let's go to the AFP.

US President George W. Bush on Wednesday renewed calls for the formation of the government while the UN special envoy to Iraq Ashraf Qazi held talks with Shiite clerics in an attempt to break the impasse.

"We fully recognize that the Iraqis must step up and form a unity government. Vacuums in the political process create opportunity for malfeasance and harm," Bush said.

Qazi met revered Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and radical cleric Moqtada Sadr Wednesday.

"I spoke to Ayatollah Sistani about forming a national unity government as soon as possible to accept the challenges faced by the country," Qazi said.

So, what do you think was the cause of the shift? Another in a series of "forceful statements" by Bush in Washington, or perhaps the UN envoy who met with Sistani and Sadr(who have both repeatedly refused to meet directly with US personnel managing all contact through "envoys?")

But I saw a picture of Bush on an aircraft carrier and he looked so tough.....

(In a larger sense, we'll have to wait to see what this really means. Jaafari won the initial Shia bloc caucus by one vote after being backed by Sadr. So, the question is where Sadr's votes will go. It's not too likely that they would go to a moderate so we'll have to see how the politics will play out.

The Sunnis are trying to force an immediate decision by calling a quick parliament to force the Shia to pick one of the other two more moderate candidates currently on the table rather than allowing Sadr to build consensus for his own candidate to replace Jaafari. Oh, and there is a chance Jaafari could win a second vote, but if that happens, it is a sign that the Shia are displeased with Sunni maneuvering.)

(Also of note. Juan Cole is not reflecting this change yet. He is portraying a very different political situation in a post just a couple hours old, so this storyline certainly bears watching as what we're getting may not reflect the complexity of what's really going on.)

Also, there's this report today that 19,548 people have been kidnapped in Iraq since the beginning of 2006. That sounds like an awful lot, but at the same time, that's a pretty exact number, so it's certainly based on something.

UPDATE: Apparently, I'm not the only one who noticed the AP's misrepresentation. Their current article, by the same reporter but completely rewritten, puts the UN meeting in the second paragraph where it wasn't even mentioned before.