Ezra has already mentioned the bizarre events that took place in Baghdad on Monday. A bunch of armed Shiite militiamen entered Baghdad's municipal building, deposed the mayor, and installed their own guy in office. The deposed mayor is unharmed -- apparently he wasn't in the building at the time -- but he has officially resigned, and he's fleeing the country.
There's a bunch of things to be said about this. How well can we be doing in providing security when thugs can just march into City Hall, kick out the old mayor, and install a new one? How can you have a stable democracy when anybody with enough guns can put whoever they want into power? How can we convince Sunnis to buy into the new Iraqi government when Shiites are using weapons to put people into office? But the thing I really want to address is the way that this shows the error of so much right-wing talk about regime change.
