The new guy

Robert Dreyfuss profiles the new Iraqi Prime Minister, Jawad al-Maliki, who seems like a swell guy:

Last year Maliki pushed for a law that would have imposed the death penalty not only for insurgents but even their sympathizers, including anyone found to “finance, propagate, cover up, support, or provide shelter for the terrorists, no matter how involved they are.” He has bitterly condemned not only the Sunni-led resistance that opposes the U.S. occupation, but also the two moderate, secular parties that hold several dozen seats in Iraq’s parliament, led, respectively, by Salah Mutlaq and Iyad Allawi, the former a secular Iraqi nationalist who claims to maintain a dialogue with elements of the resistance and the latter a secular Shiite who spent years on the CIA’s payroll as an opponent of Saddam Hussein. “It should be recalled that some of the electoral lists contain elements that were possibly part of the machinery of the old regime, i.e. Baathists who are subject to the de-Baathification law [and] intelligence agents or those who got involved in the Iraqi Intelligence Service immediately before the collapse of the regime,” warned Maliki.

He enthusiastically endorsed the wholesale purge of the police force and the Interior Ministry that was imposed by Bayan Jabr, the hard-line official of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), saying, “Hateful elements have penetrated the security services and we must purge them.” The result, of course, was the creation of a ministry whose commandos are heavily infiltrated by SCIRI death squads responsible for the murders of thousands of Iraqis.

Doesn't quite seem like a uniter, does he?

Dreyfuss adds:

In the deal that brought Maliki to power, the Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, deigned to make a deal with the two Kurdish warlord parties that control the Kurdish enclave in the north, and with the Sunni fundamentalist religious bloc, the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood secret society. But pointedly they excluded both Mutlaq and Allawi. By including the Sunni fundamentalists, whose leaders got both a deputy president slot and speaker of the parliament, Maliki and the Shiites put their stamp of approval on the Lebanonization of Iraq. And by excluding the secular Mutlaq and Allawi, they made it clear that Iraq has no place for anyone who wants a united state with a strong central government.

The "Lebanonization of Iraq." We're hearing an awful lot of that lately. And here I thought the "Palestinization of Iraq" was bad enough.