While American politicians debate who's a maverick willing to take on the establishment, Iraq's Mithal al-Alusi meets the criteria and pays the price. In the latest in a series of battles with what he calls the "fascist" religious parties running the government, Alusi was banned from parliament for making his third trip to Israel—or, the "Zionist entity" as it's known in official Iraqi correspondence. He is not allowed to leave Iraq, could face prosecution and says he is hearing of threats on his life.

His trip to an anti-terrorism conference near Tel Aviv was his third public visit to the country that Saddam Hussein fired rockets at during the Gulf War in 1991 and that bombed Iraq's reactor in 1981. His speech at a 2006 conference there is on YouTube. Each time he has faced condemnation from the post-Saddam leaders of the new Iraq. His two grown sons were killed in an attack in 2005. The Israel trip was supposedly used to motivate the killers, though they might have been sent by rival politicians seeking to neutralize their father, who has formed a small but expanding secular party.

The Iraqi parliament acted with uncharacteristic speed and unity last month in condemning Alusi. In stripping him of his parliamentary immunity, they open the door to prosecution on some charge, like treason or aiding an enemy state.

The problem is that in a country that's been at war with so many countries in recent decades, it's hard to discern which countries are still enemies. As Alusi points out, Iraq and Iran fought a long war in the 1980s but travel between those countries is going on by the thousands every month. That war ended with a ceasefire that some Iraqis contended never actually officially ended their hostilities. Of course, Iraq attacked Kuwait in 1990 but Kuwait now has an ambassador in Baghdad. And Turkey regularly pounds Iraqi Kurdish rebels with air strikes and artillery now while Turkish companies compete for government contracts. Alusi, in an appeal to the Iraqi high court, contends that travel to Israel is legal. But Israel is still almost as potent a bogeyman in the new Iraq as it was under Saddam. (The middle-aged Alusi also opposed Saddam, serving jail time for his part in the takeover of the Iraqi embassy in Germany to protest against the dictator.)

Members of the Shiite religious party leading the government appeared to lead the attack on Alusi. He says it is in part retaliation for his frequent criticism of them and because they fear his party will siphon off voters already fed up with fundamentalist politicians. He says Iranian surrogates have approached him with money to silence him. But he insists Iraq, Israel and other Iraqi neighbors should band together to fight terror and their common enemy, Iran.