At the moment, Nouri al-Maliki's policy, if one can be discerned, seems to be "double cross everyone." It was the Sadrists in parliament who provided him with the votes he needed to become PM in the first place--early in 2008, he repaid them by sending the tanks into Basra and, with the help of American artillery and air support, gutted the armed power of the JAM. Now, he seems to be setting his sights on the Awakenings, people who made a gesture of trust in turning on their erstwhile AQ (and other) allies, in turning over their biometric data and home addresses to the U.S. military, and in exposing themselves to constant attack from one of the most vicious terrorist organizations on the planet.

Now, such a policy would make a tiny sliver of sense of he were doing so against a backdrop of a promise of continuous U.S. presence for the foreseeable future. But he's not. In fact, he's doing so against a backdrop of a fairly imminent (relatively) U.S. withdrawal. He doesn't even control a plurality of his parliament either--he controls a splinter of a minority party that's in coalition with a party that can barely muster a plurality. In addition, he seems to keep kicking the elections that would give the Awakenings political clout further down the road.

So what's this all about? I mean, the simple answer is that he's simply vastly, vastly over-estimated the capabilities of his security forces. But I don't know that that's possible--he saw what a goatf**k the first few weeks of his Basra operation were. He can't possibly think that without having 140k U.S. troops to call on that he can simply arbitrarily crush his opposition. Hell, before large numbers of insurgents "flipped," the U.S. military was having severe problems keeping a lid on Iraq.

The man has a Master's degree in literature: he's not stupid.

So what's he thinking?
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