As that Al Jazeera clip points out, Maliki may be making progress in the security arena, but, as noted by several of the interviewees, the average Iraqi is not seeing any tangible results. Everything from electricity, food, water, medical supplies, etc. is woefully lacking. Coupled with the large numbers of Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons, Maliki has a rough road ahead.

Reports in today's WaPo and NY Times seem to bear out the notion that although overall security may have improved, not much progress has been made economically, politically, or otherwise, to improve the lot of the average Iraqi.

Some key snippets...

(NYT)Mr. Maliki’s moves against Shiite militias have built some trust with wary Sunnis, offering the potential for political reconciliation. High oil prices are filling Iraqi government coffers. But even these successes contain the seeds of vulnerability. The government victories in Basra, Sadr City and Amara were essentially negotiated, so the militias are lying low but undefeated and seething with resentment. Mr. Maliki may be raising expectations among Sunnis that he cannot fulfill, and the Sunni Awakening forces in many cases are loyal to their American paymasters, not the Shiite government. Restive Iraqis want to see the government spend money to improve services.[...]

Perhaps most worrisome, more than five years after the American invasion, which knocked Mr. Hussein from power but set off great chaos, Iraq still lacks the formal rules to divide the power and spoils of an oil-rich nation among ethnic, religious and tribal groups and unite them under one stable idea of Iraq. The improvements are fragile.[...]

But the improvements in Iraq face an array of destabilizing provincial, national and regional forces. The Sunni insurgency — now in many places operating as pro-American Awakening groups — continues to wait to see whether the government makes good on promises of jobs and a less sectarian administration of security and public services and infrastructure.

The Sadrists remain powerful and may not forgive what many consider a betrayal by Mr. Maliki, who could not have become prime minister two years ago without their blessing. Mohanned al-Gharrawi, a senior Sadrist cleric in Baghdad, said, “We feel like a bridge that they used to reach their aims and goals, and then they left us behind.”[...]

“Maliki’s war was a selective one,” says Falah Muhammad Abdullah, 46, an engineer from Falluja. “Why does Maliki’s government hunt down the Mahdi militia while it neglects Badr?”

From the WaPo...

The Basra offensive, by all descriptions, was a haphazard affair. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki consulted neither his political allies nor Iraq's parliament. American generals knew of the operation a few days before its launch. In the initial days, hundreds of Iraqi army soldiers fled their posts, forcing Maliki to bring in reinforcements. Clashes erupted across southern Iraq and in Baghdad's Sadr City district, the stronghold of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

But outside forces came to Maliki's aid. British and American warplanes bombarded Shiite militia targets, and U.S. military advisers assisted Iraqi commanders. Sadr urged his fighters to stand down and obey a cease-fire he imposed last August. Iran played a major role in brokering a politically expedient deal between Sadr and the government. The deal ended the offensive, allowing Iraqi forces to enter and maintain checkpoints around the city.[...]

The tough tactics underscored the fragile nature of Basra's security. Sadr's followers have accused the Iraqi army of being proxy fighters for the Shiite rivals seeking to weaken Sadr's movement before provincial elections scheduled for October.

Dayni is cautious when he speaks about the Sadrists. He said the Iraqi army fought only those militiamen who no longer obeyed Sadr. "We respect the Sadrist movement. They have a great history in Iraq," Dayni said. "We are not linked to any political party."

But many Iraqi soldiers are seen as partisan. Two Iraqi soldiers seated in a Humvee, near a billboard where Sadr's face had been ripped apart, said they feared returning to Baghdad. Both lived in Sadr City. They said they haven't told their neighbors that they are soldiers. Whenever they go home they wear civilian clothes.

One soldier they knew was killed by Mahdi Army militiamen in Sadr City last month, they said. Both asked that their names not be used, fearing persecution by militiamen.

"I didn't leave my house. I spent the whole time with my family," said one soldier, who had returned 10 days earlier from a break in Sadr City. "I would be killed if they knew."

Dayni himself is on a Mahdi Army death list in his Baghdad neighborhood of Amin. He said he hadn't seen his family in 77 days.

As to Maliki's performance in the Amara ops, Aswat Aliraq reports...

The Sadrist parliamentary bloc on Saturday criticized the security plan conducted by the Iraqi government in Missan province. The bloc demanded Premier Nouri al-Maliki to make the plot "professional and unbiased," as it began to target Sadrists "politically." "The security plan in Missan province was shifted from security targets to political targets," lawmaker Amira al-Atabi of the Sadrist bloc said in a press conference at the convention center in Baghdad. "Anyone who has ties with the Sadr movement was arrested including the chief of the local council, council members, and head of the council's integrity committee," she added. "Arrests took place without judicial warrants," she noted. "Security forces arrested 200 of the province's policemen, accusing them of being Sadr movement's members," she said. Al-Atabi demanded that al-Maliki ensure the military operation be "professional, unbiased, and to not target political sides." "The security plan has a great deal of violations, such as tearing up Martyr al-Sadr and Sayyid Muqtada's photos, and that state-owned buildings were not evacuated by other parties, despite Sadr's office building in Amara voluntarily having been evacuated, in addition to the degrading cursing and beating that security forces use in dealing with Missan's people," she explained.

In an interesting turn of events that highlights the tenuous position Maliki is in, Erdla of GG left me this note...

This report (Arabic) says that al-Hakim has rejected Nouri al-Maliki's request that Dawa (Maliki's party) and SIIC run together as a list in the elections. The last 3 paragraphs say why:

That Dawa are now very unpopular and unlikely to do well in the elections and that al-Hakim doesn't want SIIC to be dragged down with them.

We shall see how it plays out...