al-Maliki government in jeopardy?

Juan Cole seems to think that the al-Maliki government in Iraq may be on the road to collapse.

If al-Maliki looses the 32 Sadrist members of parliament, he would be a decidedly minority prime minister. It is not clear to me that the Fadila Party, popular in Basra and holding 15 seats in the federal parliament, ever rejoined the United Iraqi Alliance after al-Maliki took the petroleum portfolio away from them. The UIA had 130 seats in the 275 seat parliament, but needs 138 for a simple majority. UIA leaders have won votes by getting some Shiite members of Allawi's Iraqi National List to vote with them, and by joining with the Kurdistan Alliance (53 seats, but the Kurdish fundamentalists, who have 5 seats, usually vote with the KA).

With only 82 members left in his United Iraqi Alliance (one member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq had to flee to Iran when it was revealed that he had helped in an attack on the US and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983), al-Maliki would be completely at the mercy of the Kurdistan Alliance. Even this truncated UIA-plus-KA coalition could only guarantee 135 votes, not quite a majority (though as I mentioned above, in fact the Kurdistan Islamic Union usually votes with the other Kurds, so that would make 140). If the Sadrists and Fadila are so alienated as to abstain, and Allawi really could detach the Kurds from the UIA, then it seems to me that the al-Maliki government would fall at some point.