I wasn't trying to say that al-Maliki is pro-U.S....I seriously doubt that he is. At best the guy's U.S. neutral and simply thoroughly incapable of running the government...I'm more prone to believe that he's pretty much just another Shi'a politician who's not particularly fond of us (they remember what happened to the Shi'a after the first Gulf War) and is in hock to the militias (Badr Corps, SCIRI, Mahdi Army), but he was ingratiating enough to Bush personally that Bush and Rice were willing to give him the job (since they really couldn't stand al-Ja'afari). It doesn't really matter anyway, my point was that we can dump al-Maliki, but there's nobody out there who could do a better job with the Iraqi government in its current form.

Allawi is about as pro-U.S. as the Iraqis get, and he did the best he could while he was in charge, but the Iraqi people don't like or respect him enough to put him in charge...that's why his party got destroyed by the sectarian groups in the elections. There's no one out there who's going to be able to fix the Iraqi government without turning it into a dictatorship like Saddam's. And it's unlikely that the dictator who could pull that off would be pro-U.S.