I'm wondering if this was actually...

Dan Senor's or Paul Bremer's idea. Glenn Greenwald writes:

In April of this year, the British daily, The Guardian, published an article by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi citizen, documenting the increasingly autocratic practices of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The article quoted an Iraqi intelligence official claiming that "Maliki is running a dictatorship." As if to prove their point, the reaction of the Maliki government was to sue The Guardian under a law that does "not allow foreigners to publish articles critical of the prime minister or president," and yesterday, an Iraqi court ordered the newspaper to pay Maliki the equivalent of £52,000.

Sound like a law the Bush Bozos at the CPA would have dearly loved to see Congress pass, just for fun, y'know.

So, our present and future costs of this illegal invasion are going to be $2 trillion or more, we've killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and displaced several million more, seen--at last count--4680 of our own soldiers killed in combat, thousands more of non-combat causes and tens of thousands wounded, many seriously and in life-changing ways, so Nouri al-Maliki can act like a tin-pot dictator who's going to sue anyone that's "critical" of him.

Not to mention that this is a British paper, and the British have their share of losses, too, in this clusterfuck of enormous proportions.

My guess is that there's more than a few Britons, right about now, who'd be cheered to see Tony Blair's liver on a pike, just below George Bush's and Dick Cheney's.

I think about all that time the CPA spent squabbling about and editing the Iraqi constitution, but, in all that haste to bring the so-called "free market" to Iraq, it just slipped their collective minds to include basic human rights and freedom of the press....

Democracy, Bush-style, comes to Iraq, and there's no end to it in sight....