Rule Of Law

The only law that ruled under Saddam: accept the authority or you're arrested/killed.

Under Allawi and Negroponte and Bush, the same law is the only one that rules.

It's not just what they do using armed resistance as an excuse, but the arrest of political opponents.

In the last week or two, it wasn't only the anti-occupation Sunni group Association of Muslim Scholars whose members were arrested without charges. There was, for example, a (non-Sadrist [UPDATE: by other accounts, a splintered Sadrist, i.e. not allegiated to Muqtada]) Shi'a cleric in Karbala, who after criticising Sistani's position, got his office searched and then blown up. After the major Sunni Arab party in the US puppet government, the Iraqi Islam Party, left the government in protest of the Grosny-isation of Fallujah (something they didn't do during this April's Sarajevo-isation of Fallujah), they arrested several members.

Among them, Allawi's Sunni deputy PM, a story followed by Josh Narins and no one else (not the media, not the main bloggers).

UPDATE 19/11: Reuters now has a longer story on it, quoted at Under The Same Sun. Apparently, he is not deputy PM but deputy head of the sham National Assembly, and he wasn't detained by Allawi's thugs but US troops!... Yet some people who should know better are still under the illusion that the coming Iraqi elections will have anything more to do with democracy than the elections held in Soviet-occupied Central-Eastern Europe after WWII - for example Juan "Fallujah Destruction Was Legal" Cole...

UPDATE 19/11: Guardian and James @ Dead Men Left also picked up on the story; the latter noting that Naseer Ayaef, due to his position, is supposed to have immunity under the provisional legal code.