Stalling Maliki's collapse until after Sept. 15

If you want to know why the Bush administration is trying to hide Ryan Crocker from the Congressional reporting on Sept. 15,

With a mid-September deadline looming for the Bush administration to deliver its Iraq progress report to Congress, American diplomats in Baghdad are working in overdrive to prevent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government from total collapse – something that could shatter all efforts to forge a long-elusive national reconciliation.....

"Behind the scenes, there is a lot of cajoling and warning. The Americans are very much involved to make sure the Maliki government does not fall," says Rime Allaf of London's Royal Institute of International Affairs, who spoke by telephone from Damascus, Syria.

I would think that this is the truth they're trying to hide.

The military aspect of Iraq gets a fair amount of coverage, but the degree of the political collapse has been largely uncovered. (Part of the reason is that it's always hard to adequately cover the nuances of politics in other countries.)

Also today, likely as part of this pre-collapse "crisis", Maliki announced a new alliance of "moderate" Shia and Kurds.

Impossible to say how much of this is "negotiating," and how much is real threat, but in effect, Maliki just formalized the threat of Shia/Kurd domination over the Sunnis.