In Search of the Al Awda Terrorist Center

As per Spencer Ackerman, in the absence of specific information my strong suspicion would be that Nuri al-Maliki’s contention that the guys he arrested today are part of a secret Baathist plot called “al-Awda” to restore the ancien regime are BS. It would just be exceedingly odd if the Interior Ministry, which had been firmly under SCIRI control, was secretly harboring a cross-sectarian bloc of covert Baathists. By contrast, it would be totally normal for the Interior Ministry to be harboring various officials who Maliki thinks aren’t Maliki loyalists.

When Stalin was conducting his purges, there was all kinds of fake conspiracies. First sixteen members of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center were put on trial. Later he went after the “Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites” allegedly led by Nikolai Bukharin. But it was all more-or-less made up.

None of this is to be too hard on Maliki. A leader in his position basically has two choices that I can see. One is that he can act ruthlessly and undemocratically without regard for the rule of law. The other is that he can be deposed by someone who will act ruthlessly and undemocratically without the rule of law. For five years or so the situation in Iraq was so terrible that the terribleness of the situation managed to preempt attention from the incredibly unpromising background conditions existing in that country. But you’re talking about a place with a serious “resource curse” issue, no state institutions that command broad respect, and no consensus about legitimacy or what the country ought to look like.