Number One

A Post reporter has made the shocking discovery that Iraqi communities are motivated by self-interest and that each community and subgroup thereof is trying to maintain and increase its comparative advantage. And furthermore it appears that the political factions representing Iraq's ethnic and religious groups are using their positions in government to provide disproportionate benefits to their particularist constituencies rather than seeking "consensus," whatever that is. It appears, moreover, and much to everyone's evident surprise, that a political party which originated as a resistance movement seeking to overturn Saddam Hussein's secular government in favor of a Shi'ite theocracy is in fact seeking to turn Iraq into a Shi'ite theocracy. Why, it just might be the case that certain other factional players in Iraqi politics, having acquired and equipped private militias, are in fact using them. It seems that Ahmed Chalabi--remember him!--is in charge of something called "de-Baathification," and curiously enough this once-exile and always-con-man is using the de-Baathification process to systematically deny Iraq's Sunnis a place at the table. My goodness. What an entirely unpredictable outcome.