Finally, unexpectedly, out of the blue even, we appear to have arrived at a grand cross-party consensus on Iraq: it’s Nuri al Maliki’s fault and he should be fired. Faced with the tough task of biting the bullet one way or another, pols across the partisan divide seem to have arrived at this as the one position they can get behind and push on the Sunday shows.
Which, of course, puts into a rather sharp relief the simple but less and less often spoken fact that Iraq is a country under foreign military occupation.
But watching the Sunday shows today — both in what would-be-premier Allawi said as well as the comments of various US political leaders — you see what’s behind the dump Maliki movement: a crystallizing belief that democracy just hasn’t panned out in Iraq and that it’s time to install a strongman government that can get the country in its grip and calm things down. In Allawi’s interview with Wolf Blitzer he basically make this point pretty close to explicitly.
The Allawi boomlet is the other shoe dropping on America’s democratizing mission in Iraq.
