Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and his colleagues have made an impressive start.

Remember that daily drum beat from inside the DC beltway about how the Iraqi government just had to get started and had to find agreement soon between their factions? Threats and deadlines filled the airwaves.

The Iraqis were building a democratic government out of three factions with little recent history of cooperation or trust, and what was their model? Well, they could study the US government and how it worked via daily TV broadcasts and newspapers.

So the Iraqis have done it. They pulled a government together. And they have demonstrated an ability to work together, despite all that daily noise from DC.

There is a theory abroad about how that happened. As the Iraqi politicians studied and searched for ways to work together and build a new democratic government, someone came up with a new and bold idea: turn off all television sets reporting on the US government, and ban all newspaper accounts about politics in the US.

In the startling silence that followed, the theory goes, they quickly fashioned something never before seen in those parts: a democratic government.

Has anyone ever calculated how much our DC lawmakers accomplished in the way of cooperation and agreement during that same period of time?

Maybe they should think about how the Iraqis did it.