IT TOOK ABOUT twenty minutes after the last official U.S. combat troops crossed the border from Iraq into Kuwait for the Potemkin village of “Iraqi stability and democracy” carefully constructed by the American occupation to fall apart. The regime of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has brought a terrorism indictment against the vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi, who promptly headed north to autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan where the central government’s hand doesn’t reach. Purges of university professors and arrests of political figures not favored by the al-Maliki regime are underway.

Sunni and independent Shia political figures now accuse al-Maliki of organizing a new dictatorship, with the support of the United States which is shipping billions of dollars in advanced weaponry to Iraq – ostensibly to defend against a possible Iranian threat, which may be slightly incongruous since al-Maliki’s adversaries accuse him of acting as Teheran’s agent.

In possibly related developments, suicide and car bombings resumed – signaling that some of the “Sunni Awakening” tribal leaders may be pulling their “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” hats out of mothballs. With this kind of democratic stability, who needs chaos?