Take the Mullah and Run.

There are some things that happen that are not disastrous by themselves, but manage to remind us all of the elephant in the room.

Around the same time that my wife and I got married one of her high school friends moved to the town where we lived. The friend was also married to my brother in law. She’s gruff, single-minded and apparently quite relentless when angered. She was the kind of woman who could easily have been found to have killed former paramours for use as chili meat. He on the other hand was the ultimate beta male; quiet, submissive, and accepting, accommodating and fairly sickening. We both glibly predicted marital fallout that would make the basis for a fine episode of Law & Order.

I think that they suspected the collective predictions, sadly. The entire dynamic created a zany bonanza of awkward silences and a legion of rainchecks for social appointments.

The couple undertook a PR campaign to rival the enthusiasm and sincerity of Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch; they were desperate to validate their relationship’s viability through us. One such attempt involved inviting us to dinner whereupon a single cat hair was found to be resting on top of the risotto.

She apologized with ferocious and unsettling honesty while my wife and I really couldn’t bring ourselves to care. In our house, the five second rule of food on the floor still being edible has been abused to a criminal extent and I’ve been known to regularly snack on old gravy stains. The warnings regarding spoilage in our home are viewed as nothing more than a loose commitment to not eating brown dairy products. An entire litter of kittens could have been resting atop the cheesy goodness of the Arborio rice and I’d have been content to eat around them. Regardless, the two of them left us to sit at the dinner table while they went off to another room to fight and marinade each other in guilt. We clumsily arranged our departure when they returned.

They are now divorced and it turns out that rice was not their core issue.

Such (miraculously) is the lesson that the United States can take from the Case of the Sprinting Allawi.

The former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi was forced to flee from a mosque this weekend where he was supposed to meet with local religious leaders. Allawi is seeking election to the proposed Iraqi Parliament. What should have been no more noticeable than George Bush waving to the press on his way to church turned into a full media moment when Allawi was chased out of the mosque and pelted with shoes.

Allawi is a moderate, secular Shiite who has become representative of the US reformation of the Iraqi government - exactly the kind of guy you don’t want to see running from sandal-flinging malcontents. It should be noted that while the malcontents attacked with shoes they were apparently wearing machetes and pistols to church…to church.

Although, if the Iraqis were to stick to just using shoes the mortality rate in the present conflict would go way, way down. I think more than they need a US-brokered election the people of Iraq need a footwear-only wartime policy by the 15th of December. No one has ever had their Hummer blown apart by a box of Doc Martens on the side of the highway.

What’s telling in all of this is that Allawi is exactly the type of Iraqi that the US-led invasion was hoping to produce as a leader. He is the vision of moderation in a malformed nation jammed between Baathist fascism and religious autocracy. He is very much a standard for the democratizing of the Arab world that the United States hopes to domino with a successful campaign in Iraq. When the hawks were touting the success of the elections that created the interim government, a great deal of the praise centered on the moderate and modern Prime Minister. Ayad Allawi was the proof in the American pudding. Now, thugs working for the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr chased Allawi away from a mosque and generated video where the former Prime Minister looks like a chubby kid dodging a snowball fight.

I won’t torture this sad metaphor much further but Allawi’s flight is the hair on the risotto. It bears no real impact on anyone save for Allawi himself and probably holds more omens of doom for his chances at election than anything else.

But there are those who are saying and have said all along that the democratic template being placed over Iraq simply will not take. While some find the notion of incompatible cultures offensive and even racist one cannot deny that secular moderates are finding very little secure ground in Iraq. Al-Sadr, who may have orchestrated the shoe-fight and ruined dinner has more popular support despite being an almost perfect antithesis to the pedigree the US hopes will end up leading Iraq.

It may end in divorce.