A Maliki victory in the April elections, increased Kurdish agitation for outright independence, or continued territorial gains by al-Qaida all threaten to accelerate that devolution. "Maliki gets the lion's share of the blame, because his paranoia and brutish power grab have terrified the rest of the country," says Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former CIA Middle East analyst. "But what's done is done, and at this point it's hard to see how you put Humpty Dumpty back together again out of Iraq's Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish parts. To make Iraq work probably requires a shift of power from the center to the periphery." Which is what Biden was saying all along.
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