With the biggest station and more money flowing and disappearing in world history, if you can't have an (indirectly) CIA-funded putsch in Baghdad, it's hard to imagine where you could have one these days. Still, I bet it doesn't happen. This would be at least the second time Allawi fronted a failed coup, the last time Saddam was still in power.

(And of course, I'm being snarky. Such an operation wouldn't happen without authorization from the White House, which doesn't seem forthcoming. Yet, anyhow. For his part, a former Agency analyst dismisses the notion. "The Iraqi intelligence service is not to be equated with the INA, and I don't see much of a circumstantial case." It's worth noting that there does seem to be something in the full NIE if not the unclassified key findings that prompted everyone from Bush to Hillary Clinton, Carl Levin and now Dianne Feinstein and Peter Hoekstra to call for Maliki to be replaced, even though a new government could take months to put together, as the Maliki one did, and it's hard to see how anyone who came next would be any better, for lots of structural reasons. Something that seemingly goes beyond the analysis of the unclassified key findings that describe what everybody knows about him being too passive on the national reconciliation front.)

Update: Justin has more on a more likely direct funder of Allawi's latest lobbying efforts: "In the past, Allawi has funded his Washington efforts through the generosity of wealthy expatriates. In 2003 and 2004, an Iraqi doctor living in London paid $340,000 to the lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis and others to promote Allawi in the nation's capital."

Posted by Laura at August 24, 2007 03:17 PM