ON APRIL 30th Nuri al-Maliki stepped behind a cardboard voting booth in a hotel ballroom in Baghdad, cast his ballot and raised a triumphant finger dipped in purple ink, urging other Iraqis to head for the polls, too. But this was in the relative safety of the fortified “green zone”, the government area which, he fears, is the ultimate target of opposition fighters now proliferating to the west and north of the capital. Elsewhere in Iraq the election took place amid bombs and bitter sectarian animosity between Sunni and Shia politicians. Even if most Iraqis managed to vote, there was no sign of this gulf being bridged. The dour, authoritarian Mr Maliki seems bent on keeping an almost exclusively Shia grip on Iraq. Since January the security forces have lost control of large chunks of Anbar province, west of Baghdad, to aggrieved Sunni fighters, some of them proclaiming allegiance […]