THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

Don't exaggerate Iranian threat
Friday, May 19, 2006
BY THOMAS W. LIPPMAN AND JUAN COLE
There are many good reasons why it is desirable to prevent Iran from acquiring the capability to develop nuclear weapons. But in assessing the Iranian threat and deciding what to do about it, the United States and its allies should take care to sort out the real strategic issues from the spurious ones that are filling up so much airtime and so many magazine columns. In particular, decisions should not be driven by the idea that Iran -- even an Iran with a handful of nuclear warheads -- presents a strategic or existential threat to Israel. It does not.

Israelis are understandably apprehensive about the bellicose statements emanating from Iran's odious president, Mahmoud Ahma dinejad, and it may be that the Ira nian's hateful rhetoric foments anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish senti ment around the Middle East. In military terms, however, Iran presents no credible conventional military threat to Israel.

Let us assume the loudmouthed Ahmadinejad really means what he has been saying about Israel. And let us assume that when he calls for Israel to be wiped off the map he is not offering an abstract concept, as if the parti tion of Palestine in 1948 could be revisited, but that he means it is Iran's duty to do something about it. And let us assume that he has some support in the Iranian armed forces, among the people who would have to deliver any strikes against Israel upon which the Ira nian leadership might agree.

His rhetoric cannot change the balance of military power.

Iran is a weak, developing coun try with an annual per capita in come about one-eighth that of Israel. Iran has a much larger population, but its advantage in manpower is roughly similar to that which Egypt had in 1967. Israel is a rich, sophisticated first-world coun try with an extremely powerful military and a highly advanced technology sector.

Israel's air force is probably the best in the world and can fly more missions in the same time than can the U.S. Air Force. Iran, in contrast, has a small, poorly trained air force with obsolescent equipment that would be instantly devastated in any encounter with Israel's. And it strains credulity to imagine that Iran could attack Israel overland or from the sea unless everyone in the Israeli military went to sleep for weeks and failed to notice the movements of troops or ships. No credible Iranian force could get within striking distance.

But what if, five or ten years from now, Iran has nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them against Israel?

Even if we assume that some people in Iran would then truly plan and intend to fire those warheads at Israel, are we also to as sume that the entire Iranian leadership -- military, political and clerical -- would acquiesce in such a plan? And are we to assume that these people in the leadership, whoever they may be five years or a decade from now, are collectively insane and suicidal, in ways that Stalin and Khrushchev never were? Are we to believe that they would initiate a nuclear catastrophe, a step no other nation has taken in the 60 years of the nuclear era? Do we think Iran is unaware that Israel has nuclear weapons and multiple means of delivering them? Do we believe the Iranians are prepared to shrug that off and plunge ahead to their own doom? Do we think the people and leaders of Iran are willing to give this whole new meaning to the term "suicide bomber"?

It is true that Iran menaces Israel, mostly through its support of terrorism. But the reason Iran re sorts to terrorism is that it has no other way of inflicting real harm on the Jewish state, which is capable of defending itself and has the full support of the United States.

Some Israeli commentators say that it is easy for Americans to take comfort from the Cold War experience, in which mutual assured destruction deterred the United States and the Soviet Union from attacking each other. The Israelis say they don't have the luxury of that gamble. Given Israel's history, their apprehension is not surpris ing. But American decision-makers would be well advised to proceed on the basis of realistic evaluations, not emotions.

Thomas W. Lippman is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute and is a former Washington Post Middle East correspondent. Juan Cole is professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan.

OIC mulls plan to end Iraq violence
22 May 2006

SHARM EL-SHEIKH: The Organisation of the Islamic Conference may propose sending a peacekeeping force led by itself or the United Nations to end violence in Iraq.

Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said the structure of the proposed option may follow that of the London Conference that played a role in ending the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Addressing a Press conference at the World Economic Forum on West Asia here yesterday, the Prime Minister said it was vital that the proposal be viable.

Abdullah said there was increasingly a belief within the international community that the prolonged presence of Western troops in Iraq had worsened the security and humanitarian situation there.

There was also the notion that an alternative was sorely needed to bring peace back to that country.

"But the Iraqis themselves must be serious about wanting violence to end," Abdullah said.

He added that the OIC would first bring all stakeholders in Iraq, including the occupying powers, to the negotiating table.

"I am quite tempted to pursue this line," Abdullah said.

Iran biggest beneficiary of US-led Iraq war: Albright
5/22/2006 AFP
LONDON (AFP) Iran has benefited most from the US-led war in Iraq and would make further gains if the daily bloodshed ended up dividing the country, former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright said on Sunday.

As for the Iranian nuclear row, a "high level" member of the administration should respond to a letter from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to US President George W Bush and also engage in direct dialogue with Tehran, Albright told the BBC in an interview while on a visit to London.

The former top US diplomat welcomed the formation on Saturday of Iraq's first permanent government but reiterated her concerns about the situation.

"The main problems that I see are the unintended consequences of this war, the biggest one frankly being at the moment is that the country that gained the most out of this war is Iran so I am very worried about it," she said. Albright, who served under former president Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001, highlighted the dangers of an internal conflict between Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority and the Sunni minority.

Asked what she thought about the risk of the country being divided into three parts - the Kurdish north, the Sunni-dominated centre and the Shiite south - Albright said this would be a dangerous development.

"It would have deep implications obviously on Turkey and the Kurdish issue. It would give additional power to Iran in the south with the Shia. Then the centre, which is primarily Sunni, is not homogeneous either, and one is unclear as to what role the Saudis might play or Jordanians," she said.

"I think it is better to keep it (Iraq) together, with some understanding that there needs to be local autonomy with some central control and distribution of oil revenues."

Albright, 69, has written a book about religion and politics called "The Mighty and the Almighty" in which she says the March 2003 Iraq invasion may turn out to be the greatest disaster in US foreign policy.

In the BBC interview, she also spoke about the US position in the nuclear row with Iran, advising the administration to interact bilaterally with Tehran rather than purely take the multilateral route through the United Nations.

"I think that you can't get much done if you don't have face-to-face talks that is not appeasement and it is not negotiating," she said.

Albright touched on Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush earlier this month, which called for "new ways" to settle long-running tensions between the two nations.

"The letter... needs to be responded to. Not by President Bush as a pen pal, but in a larger context in a speech given by a high-level administration person," she said.

"I believe we, with the British, need to be talking about what we are for in this battle of ideas not what we are against."

Looking to the future, Albright hoped the Democrats would return to power at the next presidential election -- possibly under the country's first female leader in the form of Hillary Clinton.

"She hasn't said she is going to run and even her husband (Bill Clinton) has said he doesn't know so how would I, and she is running very strongly for the Senate," said Albright. "But I think she is a remarkable person and the United States is ready for a woman president."

The Great Iraq Oil Grab

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted May 22, 2006.

The official reasons the U.S. invaded Iraq don't hold water. So, as the man said, follow the money ... straight to the oil fields.

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There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Pentagon planners wanted to name the invasion of Iraq, "Operation Iraqi Liberation." Only when someone realized that the acronym -- O.I.L. -- might raise some uncomfortable questions, was "Operation Iraqi Freedom" born.

Supporters of the Iraq war airily dismiss chants of "no blood for oil" as a manifestation of the antiwar crowd's naïveté. They point out that Iraq's government still controls its oil and argue that we could have simply bought it on the open market.

Both of those claims are true on their face, but bringing Iraq's vast oil wealth under the control of foreign multinationals -- with U.S. firms the best positioned to develop it -- was always central to U.S. plans for Iraq. That Iraq's oil will continue to be "owned" by the "Iraqi people" is what differentiates classical 19th-century colonialism practiced by British officers in pith helmets from the neocolonialism the United States perfected in the second half of the 20th century. The newer brand can be summed up like this: We'll respect your sovereignty and abide by your domestic laws -- as long as we can help you write those laws to guarantee our firms' profits.

That's the central tenet of corporate globalization. Trade deals like NAFTA -- and the agreements implemented by the WTO -- are designed to "harmonize" countries' domestic laws regulating everything from capital flow to food safety to the environment in order to make them friendly to international investment. In Iraq, that philosophy was taken to an extreme, at gunpoint and with disastrous consequences.

Oil -- the engine that drives Iraq's potentially rich economy -- was the prize that made it worth a full-scale commitment of American armed forces.

Oil lust

It was a prize that the first oil presidency -- the president, vice president and national security advisor are all former oil execs -- lusted after long before the attacks of 9/11. The Washington Post reported that even as the Bush transition team prepared to take power in 2001, changing Iraq's regime and seizing its oil were already on the table:

Early discussions among the administration's national security "principals" -- Cheney, Powell, Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- and their deputies focused on how to weaken Hussein diplomatically. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz proposed sending in the military to seize Iraq's southern oil fields and establish the area as a foothold from which opposition groups could overthrow Hussein.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told author Ron Suskind that Dick Cheney also supported an invasion of Iraq before Sept. 11, and the New Yorker's Jane Mayer reported on a top secret National Security Council document dating back seven months before the terror attacks that gave some insight into the vice president's thinking:

It directed the N.S.C. staff to cooperate fully with [Cheney's secretive] Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding" of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

In her new book, "The Bush Agenda," Antonia Juhasz detailed how, six months before the invasion, the administration brought in a group of oil executives to advise them on Iraqi oil policy (this occurred as President Bush was telling the American people that he had no intention of going to war). The State Department also set up a consulting group under the "Future of Iraq Project" called the "Oil and Energy Working Group." After some back and forth among the various consultants, a consensus was reached that Iraq's oil "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war."

But they couldn't just say that, or the war's proponents wouldn't be able to sneer at those unruly antiwar types. After the invasion, the administration did a yeoman's job of deflecting the criticism; Bush called Iraq's oil wealth its "patrimony" and promised it would stay in the hands of the Iraqi people. When all of Iraq's state firms were privatized, the administration exempted Iraq's national oil company.

But that was political cover. The administration and the oil execs who consulted on the policy, knowing that fully privatizing Iraq's oil production would give their critics powerful ammunition, took an approach to Iraq's oil that largely flew beneath the media's radar. They decided on writing a new "transitional" oil law that gave foreign companies a far greater cut of the country's oil wealth than they've been able to get anywhere else in the Middle East.

Oily new laws

I recently conducted an interview with Juhasz, who explained the details:

The United States crafted a new oil law for Iraq that provided for production sharing agreements (PSAs), which are contractual terms between a government and a foreign corporation to explore for, produce and market oil. Production sharing agreements are not used by any country in the Middle East or, in fact, by any country that's truly wealthy in oil. They're used to entice investors into an area where the oil is expensive to produce or there isn't a lot of oil.

But Iraq's oil reserves are very easy and cheap to get to. You essentially just stick a pipe in the ground and you get oil. There's absolutely no reason for Iraq to enter into PSAs, but there's every reason for Western oil companies to want them -- they provide the best terms short of full privatization of the oil.

[It's estimated that] Iraq has 80 oil fields. Seventeen of them have been discovered. Under the new oil law -- written into the constitution -- those 17 will be under the control of the Iraqi national oil company.

All undiscovered oil fields are now open to the PSAs. That means, depending on how much oil there is in Iraq, foreign companies will have control over at least 64 percent of Iraq's oil and as much as 84 percent.

PSAs are the worst possible deals for countries; in Latin America some of the worst PSAs gave domestic governments royalties of just one percent of their natural gas revenues.

Iraq's permanent oil law is being written with the help of Bearingpoint Inc. under a contract from USAID. The Virginia-based company (which was KPMG until it changed its name after being embroiled in the Arthur Anderson accounting scandal) prepared a report for the Bush administration in 2003 that concluded "foreign participation [is] the most efficient way of developing the sector," according to Dow Jones. A USAID spokesman said the company "will be providing legal and regulatory advice in drafting the framework of petroleum and other energy-related legislation, including foreign investment."

The principles embedded in the transitional oil law can't be dismissed down the road by Iraq's legislature with a simple vote; they were built into the country's Constitution, a document that Iraqis approved without having a firm grip on its details. (Read more of the interview with Juhasz for some insight into how that happened.)

Chapter 4, Article 109, specifies that all new oil fields will be developed "relying on the most modern techniques of market principles and encouraging investment." While the constitutions of other energy-rich countries lay out principles regarding their resources, Iraq's is unique in specifying that future governments must develop the country's most valuable commodity in tandem with foreign multinationals.

Contrast that with other oil producers; Saudi Arabia's state oil company, Saudi Aramco, has a monopoly on oil production, and it enters into agreements with foreign companies for specific parts of the process. The Saudi government imposes a special tax on foreign energy companies' revenues from those processes and invests the windfall from high oil prices in education and infrastructure.

Under Iraq's new laws, those kinds of policies -- common among oil-producing countries -- are prohibited.

Rewarding the corporations

Saying that Iraq's vast oil reserves -- projected by some analysts to be the largest in the world, greater than Saudi Arabia's -- was the sole motivation for the U.S. invasion of Iraq simplifies a complex issue. Opening Iraq's economy has the potential to reward the Bush administration's corporate allies with enormous windfalls as the country rebuilds after 25 years of war. Iraq has a well-educated work force and is well-positioned on global trade routes. Oil is the cherry on the sundae.

That's why Iraq's new oil laws have to be viewed in a larger context. Gaining control of the bulk of Iraq's oil was a key part of a broader economic invasion of the country, launched by an administration dominated by ideologues who view the agenda of corporate globalization as a vital part of the United States' national, as well as economic, security.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, under L. Paul Bremer (who U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi called the "dictator of Iraq") instituted an infamous set of "100 rules" -- rules that privatized Iraq's state companies, threw open its economy to foreign investment, established a flat tax and instituted a dozen other measures that the big-business right has lobbied for around the world -- largely unsuccessfully -- for decades.

They not only slashed corporate taxes and allowed foreign multinationals to take 100 percent of their profits out of the country, they also gave them -- by law -- the same status as Iraqi firms. That means that all the things countries like Iraq do to direct a portion of their foreign investment income into developing their domestic economies are off the table: Foreign firms can't be asked to invest in the local economy or buy goods from domestic firms or hire a certain number of Iraqi workers or build schools and health clinics or any of the other strategies that are common in poor but resource-rich countries. Saudi Arabia's tax on foreign energy producers would violate Iraqi law.

The same company that's helping draft Iraq's permanent oil law, BearingPoint Inc., planned Iraq's entire economy under a previous contract. All of the Bremer rules worked their way into the Iraqi Constitution as well; Chapter 6, Article 126, specifies that although the rest of the orders issued by the Transitional Authority are canceled, the "100 orders" remain on the books.

Sayonara, Saddam

None of this is a conspiracy theory, as the war's supporters are wont to claim. All of it is well-documented in the public record. The national security arguments about Saddam Hussein's "WMD" and supposed ties to Al Qaeda -- all disproved -- only took centerstage after the attacks of 9/11. In the decade before, industry groups that are now closely tied to the Bush administration issued a string of position papers and op-eds urging the ouster of Saddam specifically in order to open Iraq's economy, and they openly lobbied for war on those terms.

People like Dick Cheney, George Schultz and Henry Kissinger (L. Paul Bremer was a protégé of Kissinger's) warned that American energy firms were at a competitive disadvantage as long as Saddam Hussein remained in power. While more than a third of Iraq's oil ended up in the United States during the years of sanctions against the Hussein regime, it mostly came through foreign middlemen -- Saddam gave few contracts directly to American firms, and that was intolerable to the U.S. business community.

Historians will debate the precise motivations for the American attack on Iraq for years to come. When official explanations don't stand up to scrutiny, it raises the question, cui bono? -- who benefits? After various architects of the war spent a decade pushing an attack on Iraq in order to open its economy, they came to power, and they did, in fact, invade the country and open its economy. Ultimately, that's the most compelling argument that it was, indeed, an invasion of Iraq's oil-rich economy more than anything else. Follow the money.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

Mr Lippman misses a very important point; Palestinian Arabs also live in Israel. Is Iran ready to kill all those Palestinian Isralis too? Nuclear contaminants spread depending upon wind direction; are they ready to polute and kill Jordanians and/or Egyptians too? It'll be a big mess for sure, and Iranians will have more enemies than just Jews.

With respect to Iran, Pletka along with other AEI scholars regularly denounces those who propose diplomatic engagement. 8 "Any opening from the United States will only lend credibility to that government and forever dash the hopes of a population that, according to reliable polls, despises its own leadership," wrote Pletka in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. "We have seen that engagement with the current leadership of Iran would not achieve policy change; all it would do is buy an evil regime the time it needs to perfect its nuclear weapons and to build a network of terrorists to deliver them." 9 Pletka also echoes a hard-line neocon position on Saudi Arabia. "The United States remains oddly reluctant to fight Islamic extremism at one of its most important sources: Saudi Arabia," she wrote in December 2005. 10

Pletka advocates a more aggressive "regime change" foreign policy along the lines described by AEI colleagues Richard Perle and David Frum in their book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. "The political prescriptions contained are terrific," Pletka told the Jewish magazine The Forward. "This is a very thoughtful articulation of how to fight the battle ahead of us." Among those policy prescriptions offered by Perle and Frum are, according to The Forward, universal biometric fingerprinting, immediate steps to bring about regime change in Iran and Syria, a military blockade of North Korea, a diplomatic approach that treats Saudi Arabia and France as rivals if not "enemies" and a decreasing American involvement in the United Nations. 11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansar_al-Islam

Ansar al-Islam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ansar al-Islam ... Supporters or Partisans of Islam) is a Kurdish Sunni Islamist group, promoting a radical interpretation of Islam and holy war. At the beginning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq it controlled about a dozen villages and a range of peaks in northern Iraq on the Iranian border. It has used terrorist tactics such as suicide bombers in its conflicts with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and other Kurdish groups.
...
Origins
Ansar al-Islam was formed in December 2001 as a merger of Jund al-Islam (Soldiers of Islam), led by Abu Abdallah al-Shafi'i, and a splinter group from the Islamic Movement in Kurdistan led by Mullah Krekar. Krekar became the leader of the merged Ansar al-Islam, which opposed an agreement made between IMK and the dominant Kurdish group in the area, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

Ansar al-Islam fortified a number of villages along the Iranian border, with Iranian artillery support. The local villagers were subjected to harsh sharia laws; musical instruments were destroyed and singing forbidden. The only school for girls in the area was destroyed, and all pictures of women removed from merchandise labels. Sufi shrines were desecrated and members of the Kakkai (a non-moslem Kurdish religious group) were forced to convert to islam or flee.

Ansar al-Islam quickly initiated a number of attacks on the peshmerga (armed forces) of the PUK, on one occasion massacring 53 prisoners and beheading them. Several assassination attempts on leading PUK-politicians were also made with carbombs and snipers.

Ansar al-Islam comprised about 300 armed men, many of these veterans from the Afghan war, and a proportion being neither Kurd nor Arab. Ansar al-Islam is alleged to be connected to the al-Qaeda, and provided an entry point for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other Afghan veterans to enter Iraq.

According to theUnited States, they had established facilities for the production of poisons, including ricin. The US also claimed that Ansar al-Islam had links with Saddam Hussein, thus claiming a link between Hussein and al-Qaeda. Mullah Krekar denied this claim, and declared his hostility to Saddam [1]. The Ansar al-Islam did, however, never engage Baathist forces, and local Kurds largely accept the link to Hussein.

Operations after the invasion
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it gave air support to a PUK-attack on the Ansar al-Islam enclave, which did not draw Iranian artillery fire. The Ansar al-Islam peshmerga escaped into Iran, where they were disarmed but not arrested. Many have since returned to Iraq and joined various armed groups fighting the occupation.

Ansar al-Islam detonated a suicide car bomb on March 22, 2003, killing an Australian journalist and several others. The group is also thought to have been responsible for an September 9, 2003 attempted bombing of a United States Department of Defense office in Arbil, which killed three people.

On February 1, 2004 suicide bombings hit parallel ID-celebrations arranged by the two main Kurdish parties, PUK and KDP, in the Kurdish capital of Arbil, killing 109 and wounding more than 200 partygoers. Responsibility for this attack was claimed by the then unknown group Ansar al-Sunnah, and stated to be in support of "our brothers in Ansar al-islam."

Ansar al-islam is thought not to be active in Iraq at present, but has an extensive network in Europe organizing finance and support for armed attacks within Iraq. Several members of such groups have been arrested in European countries such as Germany and Sweden.

http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/mideast/iraq.html

Human Rights Watch 2001

IRAQ AND IRAQ KURDISTAN

Human Rights Developments
The Iraqi government continued to commit widespread and gross human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests of suspected political opponents, executions of prisoners, and forced expulsions of Kurds and Turkmen from Kirkuk and other districts. Known or suspected political opponents living abroad were reportedly frequently targeted and threatened by Iraqi government agents.
...

Critique of US Policy in Iraq

Bush Administration policies in Iraq have largely been a failure. It has created a failed state in that country, which is in flames and seething with new religious and ethnic nationalist passions of a sort never before seen on this scale in modern Iraqi history. The severe instability in Iraq threatens the peace and security of the entire region, and could easily ignite a regional guerrilla war that might well affect petroleum exports from the Oil Gulf and hence the health of the world economy.

The relatively small number of US fighting troops that the US has in Iraq, some 60,000 to 70,000, cannot possibly hope to provide security to a country of 26 million under such conditions of ethnic and political civil war. The much smaller British presence in Basra appears not to have been effective in halting that city's spiral down into insecurity, with tribal and militia grudge fights and assassinations having become common.

The inauguration of a new Iraqi government was marred by the enormous amount of time it took to form it (5 months!), by open US imperial intervention in the choice of prime minister and in other negotiations, by the walk-out of over two dozen parliamentarians from both the Shiite (Virtue Party) and Sunni (National Dialogue Front and Iraqi Accord Front) parties, and by the failure of the new prime minister to name three key cabinet ministers central to the country's security-- Defense, Interior, and National Security. The Iraqi government is among the more corrupt in the world, working by bribes and a party spoils system.

The new parliament is virtually hung, and Prime Minister al-Maliki governs as a minority prime minister, being able to count on less than 115 MPs from his own party, in a parliament with 275 members. He is therefore hostage to the Kurds, who want to move Iraq in the direction of having a very weak central government, a degree of provincial autonomy unknown in any other country in the world, and who want to unilaterally annex a fourth province, oil-rich Kirkuk, to their regional confederacy, despite the violent opposition of Kirkuk's Turkmen and Arab populations to being Kurdicized.

The Bush administration reconstruction project in Iraq has largely failed. In part, it was foiled by sophisticated guerrilla sabotage, so that billions have had to be diverted from actual reconstruction to security. And nor has security been achieved. In part, it was foiled by a degree of corruption, cupidity, embezzlement, lawlessness and fraud that is unparalleled in US history since the Gilded Age. And in part is has been foiled by a US insistence on making most often unqualified US corporations the immediate recipient and major beneficiary of funds, so that Iraqi concerns get much less lucrative sub-contracts and relatively little of the money benefitted the Iraqi economy directly.

Military engagements between Sunni Arab guerrillas and US troops of some seriousness have been fought at Ramadi in the past week, though little noticed by the mainstream US press. Fallujah is dangerous again. Neighborhoods of the capital, Baghdad are blown up every day. A nighttime hot civil war produces some number of corpses daily, sometimes dozens, to the extent that morning corpse patrol has become a central duty of Iraqi police. A lot of us suspect that some units of the police themselves are involved in these kidnappings and killings, so that often they know just where to look for the corpses.

The main US military tactic still appears to be search and destroy, a way of proceeding guaranteed to extend the scope and popularity of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. The guerrillas appear more well-organized, determined, and effective than ever, and no lasting and effective progress appears to have been made in counter-insurgency anywhere in the Sunni Arab heartland. The human toll of the war has been deeply depressing. The number of Iraqi dead in the war and its aftermath (killed in political violence by any side) cannot be estimated, but certainly is over 100,000 and could easily be more. The 30,000 figure often cited comes from counts of reports of deaths in Western wire services, which are demonstrably a fraction of the true total. None of the nearly 1,000 Iraqis assassinated in Basra during the past month, possibly with police involvement, appears in such statistics. The US has lost over 2400 troops dead, and the number of wounded in action is over 17,000, some significant proportion of them seriously wounded, with long-term disabilities. Some Iraq War vets are suffering mental problems and were discharged because of them under circumstances that make it difficult for them to get VA care. Some Iraq War vets are shoing up homeless in US cities already. Meanwhile, Halliburton is back from the brink of bankruptcy.

There is no evidence of the new Iraqi army and security forces proving themselves effective against the guerrillas. The security forces with the possible exception of the new army are heavily infiltrated by partisan militias. A recent news article quoted an approving US officer as saying that Iraqi troops in Baqubah fought a guerrilla attack right down to the point where the troops ran out of ammunition. These were almost certainly Shiite and/or Kurdish troops fighting Sunni guerrillas, so this was actually another battle in the Civil War. No wonder they fought to the bitter end. But what I take away from this anecdote is that the guerrillas have more ammunition than do the poor s.o.b.'s in the Iraqi army, and I don't see that as a good sign. A unified military is almost impossible to achieve in conditions of civil war, in any case. Lebanon had an army when the civil war broke out there in the mid-1970s, but President Elias Sarkis was unable to commit it, for fear it would split along ethnic lines. The same problems now exist in Iraq, and are unlikely to be resolved for some years, if ever.

Iraq cannot be stabilized without the active help of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the neighboring countries. But the Bush administration has actively attempted to alienate Iran and Syria, threatening them with regime change or military attack, and guaranteeing that they would be hostile to US success and continued presence in Iraq. The US has also alienated Turkey by allowing the violent leftist Kurdish guerrilla movement, the PKK, to base itself in northern Iraq and to attack Turkey and Iran from that safe haven. The US has alienated Saudi Arabia in a whole host of ways, from insinuations that the Wahhabi form of Islam is in an unqualified way a source of terrorism, to US insensitivity to Saudi fears of the rise of a Shiite Crescent.

Bush administration ineptitude, ignorance, and often stupidity is matched by some regional players. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud El Faisal came to the US in fall of 2005 and castigated the US for allowing Iraq to fall into the hands of the Iranians (i.e. pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites), provoking a severe diplomatic tiff between Baghdad and Riyadh. Instead of being helpful to a fellow Arab country, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt alienated the Shiite south of Iraq by saying that Arab Shiites are more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. After these incidents, which enraged the Iraqi Shiites, the prospect for a fruitful role in Iraq for the Arab League have receded substantially, since Shiite Iraqis cannot see it as an honest broker.

The Bush Administration trumpets that a defeat of "al-Qaeda" in Iraq would be decisive for defeating terrorism in the world at large. But Bush and his policies led to there being anything like an effective Islamic radical terrorism in Iraq in the first place. The tiny Ansar al-Islam group that operated in the north before 2003 had been hunted by the Baath security and only survived because of the US no-fly zone that prevented Iraqi armor from being deployed against it. Bush has not shown any particular ability to put this genie, which he unleashed, back in the bottle. His war in Iraq has been an enormous boon to the international Salafi Jihadi movement, encouraging angry youths from all over the world to join it to fight to the US. Bush by his aggressive and inept policies is creating the phenomenon he says he is fighting, and so can never defeat it.

The prospect lies before us of years, perhaps decades of instability in the Gulf and eastern reaches of the Middle East. There is a danger of it doubling and tripling our gasoline prices. There is a danger of it forming a matrix and a school for anti-US terrorism for years to come. Are people in Fallujah, Tal Afar and Ramadi really ever going to forgive us? And there is no guarantee of the Shiites remaining US allies for very long, either. Many, of course, already have conceived a new hatred of America as a result of over-reaction of green National Guardsmen, who often have killed innocent civilians in the south, and as a result of iron fist policies when US troops were fighting the Mahdi Army.

The Bush administration has pushed us all out onto a tightrope in Iraq, 60 feet up and without a net.