Meet the new National Alliance, a re-consolidation of the major Iraqi Shiite political parties. They don’t know who they want as prime minister, but they like power, and along with the Kurds, they’ll be able to wield it in the next parliament. Is it 2004 in here again? Or 2006?

What kills me is that the programmatic differences between Iyad Allawi and Nouri al-Maliki are minor compared to their similarities: tough-muchacho figures who craft an authority-based politics of security as a way out of sectarianism. They competed for a similar political space, and together, the appetite for what they served ate up a clear parliamentary majority. And that’s in line with the hopeful cross-sectarian politics of the 2009 provincial elections. But because of a compounding and mutually-reinforcing mixture of ego and institutional dysfunction, we’re back to sectarian blocs in Baghdad.