contrapositive

MEN WITH GUNS Baghdad Mayor Alaa al-Tamimi was removed from office at gunpoint this week. But after a flurry of early, barebones accounts, the story has garnered remarkably little coverage.

In the most recent article on the subject I can find--a Reuters piece from Friday--we learn:

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari...was quoted this week as saying he had responded to a request from the city council to remove Tamimi.

Tamimi said Jaafari had rejected his previous offers to quit under pressure from [rival local official Hussein] al-Tahhan supporters: "What Jaafari said is very bad. Why now? This means he supports a state where armed men can just remove elected officials from office," said Tamimi.

"When Saddam was here we had one bad person. Now we have thousands running around with militias."

[...]

"When they removed the governor of Samawa, Jaafari sent a delegation to rescue him. I was removed by gunmen because I am a secular technocrat with no ties to [religious Shi'ite-dominated Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)] and not backed by a militia," said Tamimi.

"This is terrible for Iraq. It means any future elections will mean nothing because gunmen can just walk into any office and remove and install whoever they want."

I don't know enough about the feuding to know whether Tamimi is right--whether his removal was a pure militia-backed power play.

But if he's wrong, shouldn't someone on the American side have explained to us by now why he's wrong?