Rich, when I read your post about how I am over-emphasizing the “merely rhetorical” over the substantive, I couldn’t help but notice that it appeared directly beneath an ad at the top of the Corner, depicting the cover of the current edition of NR. There, the editors present one of the most substantive people in America … in drag. I guess the rhetorical must matter, at least sometimes.

In any event, as you say, the jury is still out on Maliki. I don’t expect paeans to Israel, but I also don’t think there’s anything merely rhetorical about ties to Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Sadr.

I wish I had a good prescription for the transitional stage to hoped-for functioning democracy. I don’t. I just think we are accumulating a lot of evidence that democracy itself is probably not a very good transition framework — at least if you’re going to let jihadists and their backers participate. That gets us back to the cultural issues. It’s a conundrum. It wasn’t my intention to make it sound simple. You couldn’t be more right that it is not.