The Gorillephant

clipped from article.nationalreview.com the breakdown occurred when the Iranian government “officially” requested that ex-Prime Minister Iyad 'Allawi be excluded from the talks, a request that was rejected by the Sunni IAF. As a result, the paper added, Kurdish leader Mas'ud al-Barazani may no longer travel to Baghdad, as was expected, to participate in the dialogue. Now Az-Zaman is just a local paper, and even the best paper gets it wrong, so this assertion may well be wrong in one detail or another. But the general point is undoubtedly true: Iran plays a direct role within the Iraqi political universe, and both Maliki and Barzani are responsive to Tehran, as are most of the Shiite and Kurdish leaders. Even those who are not inclined to carry out the mullahs’ directives are often obliged to do it, since they know that Iranian-backed terrorists can kill them, and the desire to survive trumps the quest for ideological consistency most of the time.