Saddam was roundly vilified as being a bloodthirsty, capriciously cruel dictator who browbeated and intimidated opponents into submission via summary executions and arbitrary accumulations of power. Some realpolitikers were saying that Saddam was merely acting as the Hobbesian political circumstances of Iraq demanded (since Iraq itself was created in 1920 by British imperial fools who wanted to keep the country divided and conquered-- didn't work). The Bush Administration rejected this line and said that Saddam's actions were unjustifiable. Now, when Allawi appears to be acting much like Saddam (or trying to), with the crackdowns and curfews and muffled speech and whatnot, now, he's defended as merely "doing what's necessary" to impose law and order on a strife-torn country. Why this obvious double standard? Obviously Saddam's brutality was reprehensible-- so why is it suddenly acceptable when Allawi does it? Allawi appears more and more to be a mini-Saddam, a Saddam Lite who, like Somoza and Trujillo, will be a son-of-a-bitch tinpot despot but "our son of a bitch."

Hopefully free and transparent elections will indeed be held, but if Allawi seizes power (either directly or via a sham election), then it'll become evident that the US, UK, and other Coalition allies will have expended copious quantities of blood and treasure to merely replace one murderous dictator with another murderous dictator who, as you indicate, is more compliant with a few plutocrats' objectives to place permanent military bases in Iraq and control its oil. The temptation will be enormous in many quarters to withdraw from Iraq and treat Allawi's corrupt ascendancy as "good enough." I don't even want to imagine the cynicism that would ensue from that.

Then, the guy takes power, makes all these pronouncements about crushing, annihilating, and destroying the resistance, talks about martial laws, gives himself special powers of detention and searches, re-institutes the death penalty, and we are supposed to just say, "well....let's just wait and see, it might just be a popular myth".

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a damned duck...and this is one duck that has done his fair share of quacking and walking like a duck in his past. How much more before we realize that the U.S. placed him in power as a "plan-b" of a having a pliant strongman (ala Pinochet in Chile, Somoza in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, etc.) when they realized that their plan to institute a Western neo-colony with a facade of democratic processes (what political scientists call Polyarchy) wasn't going to happen with a raging resistance. I mean, it's not like there hasn't been a precedent for this. This has been the American imperial "modus operandi" since it began to dab in imperialist foreign policies after the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars. Invade, conquer, place a strongman who is either a CIA man (Manuel Noriega of Panama, anyone?) or a trainee of the School of the Americas. Why suddenly is the same scenario in Iraq (of Allawi being a U.S.-friendly ruthless dictator) not credible or plausible?

Face it people...WMD's were never there and democracy in Iraq (at least as the U.S. wanted) is a dream....time for Plan-B, a ruthless Saddam without a mustache who will make sure our access to Iraq's oil and territory for military bases in the region is uninterrupted.

But, to each their own illusion (or delusion, as I would call it).

Iraq's interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, has been accus...

I find that Eschaton has found several reports in Australian sources

Did you miss the fact that the Washington Times has the story as well? The point is not how this will make Allawi appear to his supporters. The point is how this makes the US look for having backed this guy. We picked Hussein because he was a strongman type too, remember?