Round and round we go again.

The Shiites in Iraq are unhappy about those who deny the validity of the election they just won. This shouldn't surprise anyone, but evidently some are easily shocked. The article includes the following:

But the Shiite religious bloc also deepened the post-election turmoil by claiming that Islamic extremists and Saddam Hussein loyalists were at the forefront of those questioning the results.

This seems odd. Those questioning the results are, with a few interesting additions, the political front men for the insurgency, which as Donald Rumsfeld has been assuring us consists of Islamic extremists and Saddam Hussein loyalists. Why does it add turmoil if the Shiites say the same?

The interesting additions are the "secular Shiites," who got their heads handed to them in the election. Somehow "secular Shiites" seems akin to "liberal Southern Baptists." There doubtless are some, but you aren't going to win elections appealing to them.

The United States keeps hoping that something good and democratic will emerge from the muslim countries of the Middle East. Our theory is that everyone yearns for democracy and that we can succeed if we simply "enable" these aspirations. In fact, you could gather all the truly pro-democratic Arab leaders in a phone booth. In both Iraq and Egypt, the struggle is between secular dictatorship and theocratic dictatorship. The remnants are mostly corrupt pro-Western CIA flacks.

Let's get out. The money we're spending militarily could be spent on technology to replace oil and we'd be way ahead of the game.