By Anita McNaught, FOX News correspondent

You could call it a political hangover. The Iraqi Council of Representatives was all remorse and contrition today.

Chastened Parliamentarians sat around, engaged in muted mutual admonition.

They made quiet speeches. “We regret the behaviour yesterday”.. “This is not how we want the world to see us”.. “We went over the top..”.

Speaker of the House Mahmoud al-Mashhadani (shown below) was presiding again from his big desk at the top of the room. His enormous eyes scanned the delegates. Eyes that look like they have seen too much.

But he wasn’t buying into the communal repentence. Finally, he intervened.

“You’re all wasting time wringing your hands, “ he scolded. “Let’s just get on with passing the legislation, like you are supposed to do.”.

But here we discovered that the Bad Boys of the Sadr Bloc had won their point of order. Yesterday, they had quite persistently pointed out that they couldn’t pass an international treaty until Parliament had passed the law.. enabling it to pass international treaties. And that, pretty much, was where it all came apart.

Today – clearly after some furious back-room consultation – they were allowed that argument, and the session resumed with another reading of the International Treaties and Agreements Bill. Round One to the Sadrists.

But having ticked the boxes, the Speaker then turned back to the burning issue – this US/iraqi agreement. He delivered a speech to his Parliamentary colleagues..

“The Iraqi people have been kept in the dark about this Agreement and what it means. If you vote to approve it, you must explain fully to the Iraqi people why. And if you reject it, you must also fully explain your reasons..”

And, he went on, he wanted to notify Parliament that members of the Tawafic Sunni bloc have a number of demands for the government on detainees and amnesties.. and if those demands were not handled well, the government could not count on Sunni support.

Let’s stop and count the numbers here.

– There are 275 members of the Iraqi Parliament.

– The Sadrists say they won’t support the deal. That’s around 30 votes.

– Another small Shi’a party, Fadilha, came out earlier in the week and said they won’t either – that’s another 17 votes.

– The various Sunni parties control around 74 votes. Tawafic have 44 of those.

– The Kurds, 53 members.

– And the other major Shi’a parties in coalition have 85 between them.

– Then there are independents and one-member parties, which come to about 13.

IF the Agreement comes to a vote on Nov. 24 as was originally intended, then there is another issue to deal with: does it need a 51 percent majority or a two-thirds majority to pass?  That, too, is yet to be decided.

Now if the House were full, which it almost never is, a rough calculation suggests.

Two-thirds means roughly 181 votes in support needed… and 95 votes to defeat it.

Fifty-one-percent means the Iraqi government needs only 138 votes to pass the Agreement. Or the same on the other side for them to dump it.

The Sadr and Fadilha parties alone cannot scupper this Agreement, however much  noise they make. If a significant number of Sunnis decide to bail, then the government could be in trouble.

But  right now, notwithstanding the posturing in Parliament, the government looks like it still has the numbers.

Prime minister Maliki today at a press conference was bullish – defending the Agreement and saying there would be no further tweaking.

And supporters of the Agreement took to the streets yesterday around Iraq. In speeches not entirely flattering to the US, the marchers said ANY deal which got America out of Iraq by an agreed date was better than none.

This afternoon, State TV channel Iraqia engaged in its own act of contrition – running in FULL the coverage of Parliament’s near-riot yesterday, which they had so shyly cut away from just as the situation threatened to get out of control.

You can watch part of it here. done

It was quite reassuring, in a perverse way, to see female opposition MPs pile into the fray with equal gusto. I worry that they are too quiet, most of the time

Actually, we have all seen far worse in debating chambers over the years in places like Korea and Taiwan. There, politicians have actually managed to land a few punches, broken chairs over each other’s heads.

For every Iraqi voter disgusted by what they are seeing this week, there’ll be another pleased their point of view is being defended.

Click here to read more of Anita McNaught’s ‘On the Scene’ blogs!