As those who follow our discussions around here know, I have never been a Maliki fan. I think the focus on the Iraqi national political process before we win the war — the overall war — was terribly counterproductive. I also don’t think that the war in the Iraqi theater is as simple as it’s being projected by some of my fellow surge supporters. Al Qaeda is not our only enemy in Iraq; Iran is even more of a problem, and we’re not fighting Iran (though they are fighting us). There is real reason to fear that Maliki — a Shiite fundamentalist with long-time ties to Iran, Syria and Hezbollah – continues to lay the groundwork for Iraq to be drawn deeper into Iran’s orbit.

General Petraeus and our military, I believe, are showing that nation-building is more of a ground up than a top-down process, and the central government in Iraq may not be that relevant to it in the long run. But all that said, we did, as Sen. Lieberman says, midwife this government and make a huge rhetorical deal out of it. It would wreck our credibility to be seen as undermining it. I hate that we are in that position, I don’t think we should be in it, but we are there.

That said, if we have to have an Iraqi central government at this point, the prime minister is obviously going to be a Shiite. Does anyone have a better candidate than Maliki? I’ve kept my trap shut because I don’t think it’s responsible to say “Maliki must go,” as Senators Clinton and Levin are doing, unless you’ve got a better option. I sure don’t. The next most likely candidate is Abdul Azziz al-Hakim, who is even more deeply tied to Iran than Maliki is. My own view, for what little that may be worth, is that how much of a problem the Iraqi central government will be for us is dependent not so much on who runs it but on how we deal with Iran. I don’t buy that Iraq is a democracy or that these Shiite leaders are our friends; but what happens in Iraq will be determined by other factors.

All that said, though, shouldn’t Senator Clinton have a higher standard to meet in explaining why Maliki is unacceptable? This is the same former First Lady who actively encouraged her husband’s embrace of Yasser Arafat — a poisonously corrupt master terrorist the Clintons cultivated as a statesman, repeatedly hosted at the White House, and got a second intifada for their troubles. Plus, we now know that, through all that time, the government knew Arafat had ordered the cold-blooded murder of American diplomats in Sudan in 1973.

Shouldn’t Sen. Clinton have to explain on what basis Arafat was acceptable but Maliki isn’t?