Iraq: everything you need to know - to know as much about Iraq as the administration does - and probably more

Well, to quote the brilliantly original Phil Rockstroh, what we have come to in Iraq is “the dreaded Law of Eternal Poultry Return (LEPR) -- which is known, in everyday parlance, as the ‘chickens coming home to roost.’”

An unnecessary war of choice has led to a hideous conflagration of unintended consequences. So much so, it's beginning to pierce the bubble around the thick heads of Bush/Cheney & Company, as impossible as that may seem.

We appear to be at a tipping point, and perhaps a change of course.

For your perusal, I have gathered all the latest best articles on the big problem Bush/Cheney has created for our country, which they appear to be marvelously unable to solve. Don’t expect competence to suddenly hit this administration. The same fools that got us in there, are still there, and don’t know how to get us out of there.

My solution? It won’t be followed soon enough, but it will be followed sooner or later.

It is simple: declare that there is nothing we can do for Iraq anymore, except from the diplomatic sidelines, and that we cannot allow our troops to be caught up in a civil war, and that we will therefore withdraw, and let Iraqis solve Iraq’s problems.

In other words, admit failure. Cut and run. It is the only honorable thing to do. We owe our troops at least that – to get them out of harm’s way.

Perhaps we can leave some instructors behind to train the Iraq Army. Perhaps. But our troops must leave. They are dying in vain.

Unfortunately, they will continue to die in vain because our administration is useless.

That is the fact of the matter, the fact that this administration has been unable to face. They say they are now stopping to use the phrase “stay the course”, but this merely points to the fact that they think it’s more important to change their spin than their policy.

Woe is us. The Iraq fiasco will continue, and more Americans will die for a neocon dream turned nightmare.

Yesterday this blog gave you the hope of Barack Obama running in 2008. Today we give you the despair of Iraq. Face it, dear readers. After you've read the following 11 pieces, you will know as much as anybody, and you’ll be able to make up your mind. It's our civic duty as US citizen to all have our own informed opinions about the biggest mistake we’ve made since Vietnam.

For comic relief, there’s a funny piece from the New Yorker you can turn to if reading about Iraq gets depressing.


1. IRAQ: Endgame -- by James Kitfield (from National Journal)

Civil wars come on slowly at first, and then in a rush. They follow the track of contagion and the law of the tipping point. A recent war game organized by two former CIA analysts, Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institution and Daniel Byman of Georgetown University, posed this question: What actions could the United States plausibly take to control the unfolding civil and sectarian strife in Iraq? Scenarios ranged from a redeployment of U.S. forces to complete withdrawal, and even included voluntary ethnic and sectarian relocations to separate Sunni from Shiite and thus keep a step ahead of the ethnic-cleansing mobs. Participants in the game included former senior military, intelligence, and policy-making officials. One insight gleaned from the exercise was that the United States faces a dwindling and increasingly unsavory set of options in Iraq.

That and other hard truths have already dawned on the Iraqis. Shiites have discovered that majority rule is not the same thing as keeping that majority cohesive or using it to run an effective government. It also means living with a minority that is willing to bomb your holiest places of worship into dust. Sunnis, on the other hand, have grasped that the new Iraq is marginalizing them on a barren slice of the land they once ruled. These changes have left them afraid of the knock on the door by the Shiite death squad and the shadow of a threatening Iran. The Kurds see their paradise of autonomy in Iraq's north surrounded by ravenous neighbors who smell the blood of a civil war they can scarcely resist. All Iraqis observe Americans nervously eyeing the exit door.

"Everyone in Iraq has read about American public opinion polls and gotten the message loud and clear that the United States is losing patience and political will to stay in Iraq," said a knowledgeable diplomat stationed in Baghdad. "All sides are now keen to get a brokered deal before the Americans depart, so that the gains they've realized in the last few years aren't put in jeopardy. Iraq's neighbors are very worried that a U.S. withdrawal and implosion in Iraq could suck them into a chaotic civil war to defend their own perceived interests, possibly leading to conflict with each other."

The existential dangers for so many of those involved point to another sobering truth: Iraq may have started as a war of choice for the Bush administration, but it has become a war of great and unintended consequences. Immense risks lurk down every strategic road. Given the fractured state of the American body politic, it is almost certainly too late to rally the country behind an all-out war effort -- think tax increases; a war Cabinet; a full mobilization of the National Guard and the Reserves; a civilian reconstruction corps; a larger Army and Marine Corps; longer combat tours for troops; mandatory combat-zone deployments for U.S. diplomats and aid officials; a return to national service; and possibly even a limited draft.

Yet absent a plan that puts the nation on either an all-out wartime footing or the firm path to retreat, the United States is largely condemned to some tweaked-around-the-edges variation of the administration's current approach on Iraq of "muddle through and hand over." And America, the experts agree, is already losing that war.

Downward Spiral

On Monday, September 18, former Secretary of State and longtime Bush family confidant James Baker sat in a room full of recognized national security analysts gathered at the U.S. Institute for Peace in downtown Washington. Each expert expressed his or her views on the situation in Iraq. Baker was there as co-chairman -- along with former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind. -- of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan assemblage of foreign-policy luminaries tasked with charting a new course in Iraq that might win the support of the White House and Congress, Democrats as well as Republicans. The study group is expected to release its recommendations shortly after the November elections, to avoid sullying them with the muck of Washington's bitter partisan politics.

For Baker, the former chief political adviser to President George H.W. Bush and the man who coordinated the Florida recount effort for George W. Bush in 2000, the institute meeting must have seemed an inauspicious welcome back to the inner circles of Washington policy-making. According to several attendees, the experts' presentations to the dean of the Republican foreign-policy establishment were unremittingly negative on the outlook for the Bush administration's effort to plant the flag of democracy in Iraq.

"There must have been 25 experts in that room from every part of the political spectrum, and I was absolutely struck by how the overwhelming consensus was that things are very bad and getting worse in Iraq," said one participant, a description that was confirmed by others. "The only real debate centered on the need to lower our expectations, and to try to extract some stability out of a failed democracy-building experiment."

The gloom in the room reflected the unmistakable downward trajectory of a failing state beset by insurgency, a sustained assault by foreign terrorists, and a civil war of sectarian slaughter. This summer about 3,500 Iraqis died violently in a single month, the highest monthly total since the United States invaded in March 2003. The number of sectarian killings in Baghdad each month has more than tripled since February. In September, for instance, an estimated 1,450 Iraqis were killed in the capital; many of the victims were rounded up en masse from their workplaces and tortured by death squads before being dispatched with a bullet to the head. Sectarian violence, according to press reports, has already "ethnically cleansed" or displaced from their homes more than 300,000 Iraqis, and an estimated 1 million more have left the country to escape the unrelenting bloodshed.

"The situation in Iraq is obviously very serious, and the next few months will be critical," said a senior U.S. government official. "While the Baathist insurgency and Al Qaeda terrorists remain lethal and deadly, they are not a strategic threat to Iraq's future like the sectarian violence. Iraq is a country where sectarian differences are the tectonic plates of the entire society, and if this sectarian violence loosens or cuts the bonds that hold Iraq together and those plates start to separate, it's difficult to see how this or any other Iraqi government can succeed. So we're in intense discussions with the Iraqi government, and our message is that you must make the hard decisions to reach a reconciliation agreement and disarm militias in the weeks to come. Time is not working on Iraq's behalf."

GIs Still Targeted

The violence aimed at U.S. and coalition forces has likewise risen sharply. Between January and July of this year, the number of improvised explosive devices that were either detonated or defused nearly doubled, marking a record high. Insurgent attacks against U.S. and coalition forces occur every 15 minutes on average, or more than 100 times each day, according to a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. At least 69 American troops have been killed in Iraq so far this month, making it one of the deadliest stretches for coalition forces since the 2003 invasion. U.S. intelligence analysts predict that next year will be worse.

In an effort to stanch the bloodshed, U.S. commanders are keeping about 147,000 troops in Iraq at least through next spring, 40,000 more than they anticipated needing earlier this year. The National Guard and the Reserves have been put on notice that they may have to throw more forces into the fight again earlier than expected, and the U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, has extended the combat tours of units already in Iraq. Soldiers in those units and their families understand that for an unlucky few, the extension will amount to a death sentence.

On October 12, Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker said that the Army now plans to maintain its current level of 120,000 soldiers in Iraq through 2010. The Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard Cody, said that the Army is coming dangerously close to the point where its units are home for only 12 months between combat deployments. That is barely time enough to rest, retrain, and re-equip. Meanwhile, The New York Times reported recently that so many units and their equipment are committed to or exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan that only two or three of the Army's 42 combat brigades are fully ready to respond to a sudden crisis -- say, a showdown with North Korea.

"Iraq has driven home the point that the U.S. Army is simply too small to maintain the current level of deployments, or to conduct similar kinds of major stability-and-security operations in the future," said Dan Goure, an Army expert with the Lexington Institute, a defense consulting group. The strains evident in the force also reveal that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Schoomaker gambled and lost big, Goure said, when they decided not to permanently increase the size of the force a few years ago, when many former generals first sounded the alarm and when Congress seemed ready to act. "The Army's own experts will tell you that these wars of counterinsurgency take 10 years or more, and the Army is already fraying at less than the halfway point," Goure said. "That has taken the option of significantly increasing troop levels off the table at a time when [Central Command leader John] Abizaid is clearly worried that Iraq is approaching a tipping point to civil war that could plunge the entire Middle East into chaos. That's pretty scary."

Tipping Point

According to a recently leaked military intelligence analysis later confirmed by the Pentagon, American commanders have essentially ceded the Sunni epicenter of Iraq's western Anbar province to insurgents and Qaeda terrorists in order to rush scarce troops to the "Battle of Baghdad." That campaign to secure the capital, the center of gravity in the entire Iraq enterprise, still hangs very much in the balance.

"You could argue that the February 2006 bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra was a devastating blow to the entire effort in Iraq, because what that did at the end of the day was take the gloves off of the militias, particularly the Shiite militias," said Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the Army's Combined Arms Center, speaking recently at the Brookings Institution. Petraeus spent much of the past three years in Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne Division and as the commander in charge of training Iraqi security forces. "Samarra started a downward spiral of tit-for-tat sectarian violence that has proven difficult to arrest, and which is at the center of the battle of Baghdad today. So Samarra was a big event that a lot of us knew was significant, and sadly, its aftershocks have played out each day with the discovery of more dead bodies."

This violence has largely paralyzed the Iraqi government. Despite vigorous arm-twisting by senior U.S. officials visiting Iraq, most recently Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has time and again shown that he is unwilling to confront or politically incapable of taking on militias that enjoy strong support inside his own coalition. On October 2, Maliki announced yet another new security plan, the latest in a series of increasingly desperate attempts to stop the bloodshed, even as leading Sunni and Shiite politicians in his "unity" government accuse each other of sanctioned murder by militia. On October 15, Iraq's government indefinitely postponed a critical national reconciliation conference as a result of the unremitting violence. Rampant corruption and the lack of security, meanwhile, continue to hamstring reconstruction efforts in a country still beset by spotty electricity, chronic gasoline shortages, and 30 to 60 percent unemployment.

Vietnam Parallels

The grim drumbeat of negative news has forged a consensus among Americans and Iraqis: Both have had enough. Despite concerted efforts by the Bush administration to link Iraq to the greater war on terrorism, a clear majority of Americans now believe that the war, which has cost more than $320 billion in national treasure and the blood of more than 2,700 fallen warriors, was a blunder. Even once-strong supporters of the war in the Republican Party have begun to openly voice their growing pessimism on Iraq. For their part, an overwhelming majority of Iraqis now blame the U.S. military presence in their country for provoking the violence, and seven in 10 want U.S. forces out of Iraq within a year, according to a September poll by the independent Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

"Perhaps the most striking trend to me is how much less optimistic the Iraqi people are about the future than just a few years ago," said Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy expert at the Brookings Institution whose "Iraq Index" has tracked reconstruction and security operations in post- Saddam Iraq. O'Hanlon considers the Iraq mission to be so close to outright failure and civil war that he recently proposed that the U.S. and Iraqi governments consider a "voluntary ethnic relocation plan" to get in front of a potential wave of ethnic and sectarian cleansing and genocide that could kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The drawback to the plan, he concedes, "is that if you implement it prematurely or fail to time it just right, you could ignite exactly the kind of ethnic cleansing you're trying to avoid."

Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon intelligence analyst, is a longtime Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The reality is that the United States went to war in Iraq without the fundamental tools to win, because we simply do not have the civil-military structures to do nation building on this scale," he said. As a result, U.S. authorities have spent nearly $40 billion in U.S. aid and Iraqi funds in a reconstruction effort with very little to show for it, he noted, and rushed elections and a constitutional referendum that actually exacerbated sectarian divisions. Most recently, on October 11, the Shiite-dominated Iraqi parliament passed a federalism bill that would allow the formation of autonomous regions in the country, including what many see as a Shiite mini-state in Iraq's south. The measure passed despite the strong objections of, and a boycott by, the Sunni coalition. The Sunnis fear a dismemberment of Iraq and a diminution of their power, although the law did include a concession to their concerns by putting off the formation of such regions for 18 months.

"We've now reached a point where no matter what military action or strategy the United States adopts, it won't matter unless the Iraqis can reach some form of political reconciliation," said Cordesman, who concedes that such an accommodation will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve under current levels of violence. "So this remains a very high-risk operation, with some unfortunate parallels to Vietnam. In Vietnam, we also focused on pacifying major areas of the country but ignored the fact that there was no functioning central government to hold it all together."

Diplomatic Midget

How did it come to this? How did the world's only superpower, with the post-9/11 wind at its back, end up in just a few short years contemplating an ignoble and potentially generation-shaping defeat in Iraq? In its spirit of bipartisanship, the Iraq Study Group has pledged to look only forward and not to rehash the miscues of the Iraq enterprise in another exercise of finger-pointing. Some of the strategic course corrections that the group is contemplating are outlined in an accompanying article .

While it is true that whole bookshelves are now groaning under the weight of tomes detailing the myriad mistakes made in post-Saddam Iraq, experts say that some inconvenient truths must be confronted to appreciate the limited options that the United States has left in Iraq. It is increasingly clear, for instance, that although the United States may possess a superpower military, its forces are simply too small and ill-organized for long-term occupation and counterinsurgency warfare, and that any reconfiguration is likely to come too late for Iraq.

The Bush administration has also focused on elections as the centerpiece of its democratization agenda, yet recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown conclusively that institution building, a functioning government, and the rule of law are at least as important in turning around failed states. The United States lacks the essential and expensive tools for that kind of large-scale nation building, and neither the administration nor Congress has shown much inclination to sacrifice other priorities to acquire them.

"The big problem is that the United States today is a military colossus and a diplomatic midget, and that has made for a very unbalanced national security policy," said Joseph Collins, a professor at the National Defense University who was deputy assistant secretary of Defense for stability operations. "The State Department and U.S. AID are only shadows of what they need to be if we're going to conduct this kind of nation building, but Congress just refuses to fund those activities. That leaves a lot of overstressed soldiers in Iraq doing tasks they're not trained for."

No Way Back

Finally, while the largely unilateral approach that the Bush administration adopted in invading Iraq worked OK in the short-term phase of regime change, it has left the United States bearing the overwhelming burden of the nation-building effort and the counterinsurgency campaign. History suggests that it requires at least a decade, and probably much longer, to end an insurgency. With the Atlas who has shouldered the Iraq campaign now beginning to shake before the halfway point, few nations are willing to step into the shadow of an imploding state.

"If you look at the relevant historical experiences with insurgencies, the United States might be in a better position in Iraq at the end of a decade or so," said Brian Jenkins, a senior counter- terrorism and counterinsurgency expert at the Rand think tank. "But not necessarily. Israel was in southern Lebanon for 18 years, and the situation just got worse until it became intolerable." In the meantime, the U.S. presence in Iraq will continue to galvanize Islamic radicals worldwide and drain America of blood, treasure, and moral standing. That has to be weighed, Jenkins said, against a precipitous withdrawal that could lead to all-out civil war, massive ethnic and sectarian cleansing, and a major psychological victory for Qaeda and Islamic extremists. "The basic problem with the equation is that the costs and downsides of Iraq are all front-loaded and being felt today, while the potential upsides are dependent on a reasonably successful and still murky outcome some years down the road."

Kenneth Pollack is the director of research at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Formerly a Middle East analyst at the CIA and the National Security Council, he was a leading proponent for toppling Saddam Hussein, authoring the book " The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq ." Today, Pollack confesses to having trouble sleeping at night because he's contemplating Iraq.

"The situation in Iraq weighs very heavily on me, because there is just no denying anymore that the country is flat out in a state of low-level civil war, and the trend lines are heading toward an all-out civil war, which I think will be absolutely catastrophic," Pollack told National Journal . Even at this late date, he said, the Bush administration is repeating its original "fatal flaw" of not committing adequate troops, resources, and civilian personnel to the campaign, most recently by undercutting the commander's requests in staging the battle of Baghdad.

"One of the many tragedies of Iraq is that we now have experienced military commanders with sound strategies, and we are still failing to adequately support them with the necessary troops, civilian personnel, and funds," said Pollack, who briefed senior Bush administration officials in the White House last February on the need to secure the Iraqi capital and to win the support of its citizens with rapidly reconstituted government services.

"They insisted that I was exaggerating the problem of the militias and that the new Iraqi government would just make the insurgency go away. Frankly, I was stunned by their attitude," Pollack said. "So we have passed another seven months of missed opportunities, during which Iraq's problems have all gotten worse. My real fear is that we've already passed the make-or-break point and just don't realize it. Historians in five or 10 years may look back and say 2006 was the year we lost Iraq. That's my nightmare."


2. Trying to Contain the Iraq Disaster (NY Times editorial)

No matter what President Bush says, the question is not whether America can win in Iraq. The only question is whether the United States can extricate itself without leaving behind an unending civil war that will spread more chaos and suffering throughout the Middle East, while spawning terrorism across the globe.

The prospect of what happens after an American pullout haunts the debate on Iraq. The administration, for all its hints about new strategies and timetables, is obviously hoping to slog along for two more years and dump the problem on Mr. Bush’s successor. This fall’s election debates have educated very few voters because neither side is prepared to be honest about the terrible consequences of military withdrawal and the very long odds against success if American troops remain.

This page opposed a needlessly hurried and unilateral invasion, even before it became apparent that the Bush administration was unprepared to do the job properly. But after it happened, we believed that America should stay and try to clean up the mess it had made — as long as there was any conceivable road to success.

That road is vanishing. Today we want to describe a strategy for containing the disaster as much as humanly possible. It is hardly a recipe for triumph. Americans can only look back in wonder on the days when the Bush administration believed that success would turn Iraq into a stable, wealthy democracy — a model to strike fear into the region’s autocrats while inspiring a new generation of democrats. Even last fall, the White House was dividing its strategy into a series of victorious outcomes, with the short-term goal of an Iraq “making steady progress in fighting terrorists.” The medium term had Iraq taking the lead in “providing its own security” and “on its way to achieving its economic potential,” with the ultimate outcome being a “peaceful, united, stable and secure” nation.

If an American military occupation could ever have achieved those goals, that opportunity is gone. It is very clear that even with the best American effort, Iraq will remain at war with itself for years to come, its government weak and deeply divided, and its economy battered and still dependent on outside aid. The most the United States can do now is to try to build up Iraq’s security forces so they can contain the fighting — so it neither devours Iraqi society nor spills over to Iraq’s neighbors — and give Iraq’s leaders a start toward the political framework they would need if they chose to try to keep their country whole.

The tragedy is that even this marginal sort of outcome seems nearly unachievable now. But if America is to make one last push, there are steps that might lessen the chance of all-out chaos after the troops withdraw:

Start at Home

For all the talk of timetables for Iraq, there has been little discussion of the timetable that must be handed to George W. Bush. The president cannot leave office with American troops still dying in an Iraq that staggers along just short of civil war, on behalf of no concrete objective other than “get the job done,” which is now Mr. Bush’s rhetorical substitute for “stay the course.” The administration’s current vague talk about behind-the-scenes agreements with Iraqi politicians is next to meaningless. Americans, Iraqis and the rest of the world need clear, public signs of progress.

Mr. Bush can make the first one by firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There is no chance of switching strategy as long as he is in control of the Pentagon. The administration’s plans have gone woefully wrong, and while the president is unlikely to admit that, he can send a message by removing Mr. Rumsfeld. It would also be a signal to the military commanders in the field that the administration now wants to hear the truth about what they need, what can be salvaged out of this mess, and what cannot.

The president should also make it clear, once and for all, that the United States will not keep permanent bases in Iraq. The people in Iraq and across the Middle East need a strong sign that the troops are not there to further any American imperial agenda.

Demand Reconciliation Talks

Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has indefinitely postponed reconciliation talks among the nation’s top politicians. He must receive an immediate deadline to start the process. Tomorrow would not be too soon; the end of the year would be too late.

Whatever decisions Iraqi leaders reached over the past few years were achieved by pushing aside all the critical questions that were hardest to address. The Bush administration must demand not only that new talks start, but that they continue until some agreement is reached on protecting minority rights, dividing up Iraq’s oil revenues, the role of religion in the state, providing an amnesty for insurgents willing to put down their weapons, and demobilizing and disarming the militias.

More outside aid could increase their incentive to talk. Even then, the threat of an American withdrawal may be the only way to extract real concessions. In parallel with the reconciliation talks, the United States should begin its own negotiations with the Iraqi leadership about a timetable for withdrawing American troops — making clear that America’s willingness to stay longer will depend on the Iraqis’ willingness to make real compromises. Iraqi politicians have to know that they have even more to lose if their country plunges into complete civil war.

We are skeptical of calls to divide the country into three ethnically controlled regions, using the model that finally ended the Bosnian war. Most Iraqis, except for the Kurds, show little enthusiasm for the idea. Clear ethnic boundaries could not be drawn without driving many people from their homes — though an intolerable level of ethnic cleansing is already pushing things in that direction. Any effort at reconciliation will almost certainly require a transfer of power and resources to provincial and local governments. But it must be up to the Iraqis to decide the ultimate shape of their country.

Stabilize Baghdad

Most Iraqis have forgotten what security is — or if they remember, it is an idealized vision of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Since neither the government nor the American occupation is able to provide basic services or safety, it is little wonder that Iraqis have turned to the militias for protection. In such a world, retribution will always take precedence over the uncertainties of political compromise.

American commanders have launched a series of supposedly make-or-break campaigns to take back the streets of Baghdad. The problem is not one of military strategy; their idea of “clearing” out insurgents, “holding” neighborhoods and quickly rebuilding infrastructure is probably the only thing that could work. The problem is that commanders in Baghdad have been given only a fraction of the troops — American and Iraqi — they need.

There have never been enough troops, the result of Mr. Rumsfeld’s negligent decision to use Iraq as a proving ground for his pet military theories, rather than listen to his generals. And since the Army and Marines are already strained to the breaking point, the only hope of restoring even limited sanity to Baghdad would require the transfer of thousands of American troops to the capital from elsewhere in the country. That likely means moving personnel out of the Sunni-dominated west, and more mayhem in a place like Anbar.

But Iraqis need a clear demonstration that security and rebuilding is possible. So long as Baghdad is in chaos they will have no reason to believe in anything but sectarian militias and vigilante justice. Once Washington is making a credible effort to stabilize Baghdad, Iraqi politicians will have more of an incentive to show up for reconciliation talks. No one wants to be a rejectionist if it looks like the tide might be turning.

Convene the Neighbors

America’s closest allies in the region are furious about America’s gross mismanagement of the war. But even Iran and Syria, which are eager to see America bloodied, have a great deal to lose if all-out civil war erupts in Iraq, driving refugees toward their borders. That self-interest could be the start of a discussion about how Iraq’s neighbors might help pressure their clients inside Iraq to step back from the brink. Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich neighbors — whose own stability could be threatened by an Iraqi collapse — need to be pressed into providing major financing to underwrite jobs programs and reconstruction.

Enlightened self-interest is a rarity in the Middle East. The Bush administration will most likely have to go further to elicit real help, showing a serious willingness to expand its dialogue with Damascus and Tehran beyond the issue of Iraq and to be a genuine broker for Middle East peace. That should be the easiest part of the strategy — only this White House regards the willingness to talk to another country as a major concession.

Acknowledge Reality

While the strategy described above seems the best bet to us, the odds are still very much against it working. At this point, all plans to avoid disaster involve the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. In America, almost no one — even the administration’s harshest critics — wants to tell people the bitter truth about how few options remain on the table, and about the mayhem that will almost certainly follow an American withdrawal unless more is done.

Truth will only take us so far, but it is the right way to begin. Americans will probably spend the next generation debating whether the Iraq invasion would have worked under a competent administration. Right now, the best place to express bitterness about what may become the worst foreign policy debacle in American history is at the polls. But anger at a president is not a plan for what happens next.

When it comes to Iraq the choices in the immediate future are scant and ugly. But there are still a few options to pursue, and the alternatives are so horrible that it is worth trying once again — as long as everyone understands that there is little time left and the odds are very long.


3. Blowing in the Wind (NY Times editorial)

The generals who told President Bush before the war that Donald Rumsfeld’s shock-and-awe fantasy would not work were not enough to persuade him to change his strategy in Iraq. The rise of the insurgency did not do the trick. Nor did month after month of mounting military and civilian casualties on all sides, the emergence of a near civil war, the collapse of reconstruction efforts or the seeming inability of either Iraqi or American forces to secure contested parts of Iraq, including Baghdad, for any significant period.

So what finally, after all this time, caused Mr. Bush to very publicly consult with his generals to consider a change in tactics in Iraq? The president, who says he never reads political polls, is worried that his party could lose some of its iron grip on power in the Congressional elections next month.

It is not necessarily a bad thing when a politician takes stock of his positions in the teeth of an election. Our elected leaders are expected to heed the will of the American people. And this page has been part of a chorus of pleas for Mr. Bush to come up with a more realistic approach to Iraq.

But the way this sudden change of heart has come about, after months in which Mr. Bush has brushed off all criticism of his policies as either misguided, politically motivated or downright disloyal to America, is maddening. For far too long, the White House has looked upon the war as a tactical puzzle for campaign strategists. The early notion of combining Iraq and the war on terror as an argument for re-electing Republicans robbed the nation of any serious chance for a bipartisan discussion of these life-and-death issues. More recently, the administration seems to have been working under the assumption that its only obligations were to hang on, talk tough and pass the problem on to the next president.

The Iraqi government, which has had a hard time adopting most aspects of American democracy, seems to have eagerly embraced this administration’s lessons on how to deny politically unpleasant realities. Just the other day, The Times reported that the Pentagon had decided there was nothing wrong with a program in which phony “positive news” was planted in Iraqi newspapers. And news reports said that the Iraqi government had decided to stop reporting civilian casualties to the United Nations so there would be no record of the war’s increasing toll on ordinary Iraqis.

The way the Bush team is stage-managing the president’s supposed change of heart about “staying the course” is unfair to the Americans who have taken him at his word that real progress is being made in Iraq — a dwindling but still significant number of people, some of whom have sons and daughters serving in the conflict. It is a disservice to the troops, who were never sent to Iraq in sufficient numbers to protect themselves or the Iraqi people. And it is a disservice to all Americans, who have waited so long for Mr. Bush to act that all that is left are a series of unpleasant choices.

And it is happening in the midst of a particularly ugly, and especially vacuous, election season. There is probably no worse time to begin a serious discussion about Iraq policy than two weeks before a close, bitter election. But now that the discussion has begun, it must continue, as honestly and openly as possible. It is time for the American people to confront all the things that the president never had the guts to tell them about for three and a half years.


4. The futility of getting Iraqis to stand up
Must-See Video: The Iraq War in 8 Minutes
A new video shot for a London newspaper and the BBC by an embed with the U.S. Army, suggests, in chilling words and images, the absurd position of the U.S. in Iraq, as the people we try to train -- you know, our comrades in arms -- seem more intent on lobbing grenades at us.
Click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianfilms/0,,1397496,00.html
By Greg Mitchell

Over the years, I have made few requests of readers of this column, beyond hinting that, maybe, you ought to return here from time to time. But now I have to urge you to drop everything, finish reading this come-on, and then link to the video described below. It’s the most revealing little (eight-minute) video I’ve seen yet on our country’s preposterous position in Iraq.

Aptly, it is titled, "Iraq: The Real Story." It won’t turn your stomach, in fact, you may even chuckle in spots (like you might have done in reading much of “Catch-22”). But, hopefully, you will end up screaming at the computer screen.

That’s partly because it arrives at such a critical moment, with the death counts for both Americans and Iraqis soaring, and the debate over what to do about this catastrophe reaching a fever pitch, even before the election of a new Congress.

Here’s what you will see (notice, I wrote will, presuming you will, indeed, follow the link below).

Sean Smith, the award-winning photographer for The Guardian in London, who has put in several tours of duty in Iraq (before, during, and after the 2003 invasion), recently embedded with the 101st Airborne, for six weeks. He ended up chronicling attempts by the U.S. Army in the northern Iraqi region around Hawija and Tikrit to hand over duties, or at least work with, Iraqi military and police -- you know, helping them stand up so we can stand down. He’s now produced the video, which includes some of his photos, for the Guardian and the BBC.

It opens on a familiar note, as Smith observes that some in the 101st are on their third tour of duty. Many are just counting the days until they "are back in Tennesee." Then they suddenly are shown in a six-minute firefight with insurgents, but no bodies are found, no prisoners taken, and they may have to wait days for more action. “We do our jobs,” one young soldier says.

Then we watch the unit seize three Iraqis suspected of doing ... something. They are “bagged” -- literally have bags placed over their heads -- and taken away. Another couple locals are caught “redhanded” planting IEDs. So far so good.

But then it turns ugly.

We tag along on “a home visit for the 101st." They have been tipped off that an alleged gun dealer was hanging with a local family but nothing is found. The angry family say it's the sixth time they’ve been raided over nothing.

So where are the Iraqi forces in all this? Conspicuous by their absence. The same young soldier who spoke earlier tells Smith, “I don’t think this country will ever be ready for U.S. forces to leave it. They’re too lazy.”

Then we see and hear an Iraqi soldier telling the Americans things were better off under Saddam. They had more fuel and electricity then. An earnest U.S. soldier asks, “For those two things you are willing to give up your freedom?” His Iraqi “comrade” replies, “Of course I am, these are the essentials of life.”

The narrator then observes: “The tension between the Americans and their Iraqi colleagues is never far away. An Iraqi officer has been heard over the radio telling his men not to fire at the insurgents.” So Americans go on the “warpath.” They pay a visit to the offices of the local town council. Did I mention that a grenade had just been thrown from there into the next door compound -- which happens to be headquarters of the joint command for the U.S./Iraqi force?

No one there knows anything about that so we watch as all in the town building, plus any bystanders, are herded outdoors into the noonday sun, where the Americans berate them. “It’s another exercise that turns out fruitless for the Americans and humiliating for the Iraqis,” the narrator says. After a couple hours they are released, “hearts and minds that much further out of reach.”

A few days later the Americans are again under attack, from another building, but they bust no one. Eventually they find four Iraqi policemen who say they have seen and done nothing, even though this seems to happen every day, so “the Americans are not impressed.” Our guys complain that they also let suspicious traffic pass freely and allow illegal gas sellers to run free.

One of our officers tells them: “You are doing nothing here.” He warns them they will be arrested if our guys get shot at again.

Blackout. New scene. “24 hours on and the marriage of the Americans and the Iraqis looks headed for the rocks,” the narrator explains. We see maybe a dozen Iraqis kneeling on a porch, their hands bound behind them, in custody. Insurgents? Al-Qaeda terrorists? Maybe, at least, those black marketeers? Alas, no. Things have got so bad “the Americans are raiding the offices of the Iraqi Army, their allies, the people they are training.”

Then we see our allies blindfolded and hauled away. Believe me, this image may stay with you awhile as a symbol of the entire war effort.

Finally, we learn that a hand grenade has been thrown at one of our armored trucks from inside the secure zone -- from inside our own “joint” command center. “The insurgents, the terrorists, appear to be the soldiers of the Iraqi Army,” the narrator says simply. Well, what more does he need to say?

After more arrests, a U.S. soldier announces that’s one for us, zero for the insurgents. “But if this is what victory looks like,” the narrator concludes, before the video ends, “it is hollow indeed.”


5. US offers amnesty in secret talks
Policy is reversed as October becomes the deadliest month this year for US troops
From James Hider in Baghdad

AMERICAN forces are negotiating an amnesty with Sunni insurgents in Iraq to try to defuse the nascent civil war and pave the way for disarmament of Shia militias, The Times has learnt.

The tactic marks a dramatic reversal of policy by the US military, which blocked attempts to pardon insurgents with American blood on their hands after handing over sovereignty to a secular Iraqi Government in June 2004.

The U-turn comes amid the bloodiest fighting for two years and growing domestic opposition to the war as Americans prepare to vote in crucial midterm elections.

Even as President Bush convened emergency talks with his generals and national security advisers to review strategy in Iraq, commanders on the ground were negotiating a peace deal. Observers expect leaders of the Sunni insurgency to join a peace conference early next month.

“There’s been a change in the position of the Americans,” Jabr Hadeeb Jabr, an independent Shia politician and member of the Council for Reconciliation government agency, said. “Before, they refused to give any amnesty to the people killing Americans because there was some dispute about the risk of rewarding their killers.”

Another Iraqi MP, Izzat Shabander, a member of the secular Iraqiya bloc, said: “This amnesty is coming because the American military are always pressuring the Iraqi Government to give a general amnesty to all fighters, even those who killed Iraqis.”

The proposed amnesty, which one Sunni politician said had been negotiated between the US and insurgents without involving the Government, came as a senior State Department official admitted that US policy in Iraq had been at times “stupid” and “arrogant”.

“We tried to do our best, but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq,” Alberto Fernandez, the director of public diplomacy at the department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, said. “We are open to dialogue because we all know that . . . the solution to the hell and the killings in Iraq is linked to an effective Iraqi national reconciliation.”

The violence continued yesterday when bombers attacked shoppers buying sweets for the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, killing at least nine. A US Marine died west of Baghdad, taking the number of US servicemen killed this month to 80 and making October the most deadly month for the US this year. At least 43 civilians have been killed every day this month.

Mr Jabr said it was possible that two of the main insurgent groups — the Islamic Army and the 1920s Revolutionary Brigades — could participate at a national reconciliation conference next month. Facing increasing losses of US soldiers, and with Iraq threatening to suck the entire region into a disastrous conflict, the Bush Administration is being forced to drop its “stay the course” policy and examine new options.

In tandem with the US initiative, Iraqi religious leaders are trying to stem the bloodshed.

On Friday, 29 senior Sunni and Shia leaders met in Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, to urge their communities not to shed Muslim blood, to free hostages and to allow hundreds of thousands of ethnically cleansed people to return home. But deadly bombings of markets over the weekend have dispelled hopes of a swift end to the killing.

Mr Jabr said that the Mecca fatwa, or edict, was aimed at isolating Iraqi nationalists from al-Qaeda fanatics, who have a global agenda of attacking the West and imposing an Islamic state on Iraq.

Salman al-Jumeili, a deputy from the main Sunni bloc, Twafoq, said that the amnesty reports had caught Sunni politicians by surprise. “I’m betting this must be part of a dialogue between the resistance and the Americans,” he said.

The plan — still officially under wraps — would be to isolate Iraqi guerrillas from al-Qaeda by offering an amnesty and a date for a US withdrawal, and to use the resistance’s highly sophisticated intelligence network to stamp out foreign Islamist fighters and criminal gangs.

“The promise that on a certain date [US forces] would leave the country is hugely important for Iraqi citizens. I think a great deal of the resistance would accept a general amnesty as an important step,” he said. But the Shia-dominated Government is dragging its heels about granting amnesty to fighters who have killed Iraqi policemen and soldiers.

Yesterday, gunmen in five cars ambushed a convoy of buses carrying police recruits near Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, killing at least 15 and wounding 25 others.

Proponents of an amnesty hope that, once the threat from terrorist bombs has diminished, Shia militias would have no cause to remain under arms. Mr al-Maliki, whose two main Shia government partners run the two largest militias, might then be able to negotiate a disarmament programme.

US troops could deploy to neighbouring countries, leaving military advisers with Iraqi government troops. They would be ready to return if necessary. But huge obstacles remain. Mr Shabander said that some of the main Shia parties were reluctant because the sectarian conflict bolstered their agenda for an autonomous Shia region in the oil-rich south. Armed al-Qaeda militants paraded through city centres at the weekend, proving that they are far from being isolated from the community.

EXIT OPTIONS

Exit strategies under discussion include:

Coalition troops withdraw gradually to neighbouring countries, returning to hotspots if necessary. Military advisers stay to train Iraqi forces

Partition into federal autonomous regions. Backed by some Shia and Kurdish groups, but not by Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr and Sunnis

Talks with Syria and Iran to try to prevent foreign infiltration and to stabilise Iraqi Government

Cut and run: instant withdrawal of US forces despite probable civil war and regional meltdown


6. Diplomat: U.S. arrogant, stupid in Iraq

A senior U.S. State Department diplomat told Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera that there is a strong possibility history will show the United States displayed "arrogance" and "stupidity" in its handling of the Iraq war.

Alberto Fernandez, director of the Office of Press and Public Diplomacy in the Bureau of Near East Affairs, made his comments on Saturday to the Qatar-based network.

"History will decide what role the United States played," he told Al-Jazeera in Arabic, based on CNN translations. "And God willing, we tried to do our best in Iraq."

"But I think there is a big possibility ... for extreme criticism and because undoubtedly there was arrogance and stupidity from the United States in Iraq," the diplomat told Al-Jazeera.

"I can only assume his remarks must have been mistranslated. Those comments obviously don't reflect our policy," a senior Bush administration official said.

Fernandez told CNN that he was "not dissing U.S. policy."

"I know what the policy is and what the red lines are, and nothing I said hasn't been said before by senior officials," the diplomat told CNN.

Fernandez's comments came as President Bush gathered his senior generals to discuss changes to strategy in Iraq.


7. The genteel revolt that is remaking US policy on Iraq
Republican veterans push for end to interventionist approach
By Julian Borger in Washington (from the good old Guardian)

A "polite rebellion" is under way among previously loyal allies of President Bush aimed at persuading him to change course in Iraq and quietly abandon the foreign policy doctrine he had hoped would be the centrepiece of his legacy.

Many senior Republicans believe the "Bush Doctrine" has hit a wall in Iraq and lies in ruins. The rebels, including many foreign policy veterans close to the president's father, see it as an obstacle to stabilising Iraq and extricating US forces. But they have decided that earlier, head-on challenges have only deepened the president's resolve, and a less confrontational approach was needed that avoided blame for past mistakes if there was to be any hope of a fundamental rethink.

"It's a polite rebellion by moderate and military-minded Republicans," said Steven Clemons, a Washington analyst. "Any walk-away from the Bush line is going to be covered with a lot of cosmetics to make it look like it's not really a big change."

The focus of the new approach is the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a bipartisan commission co-chaired by the first President Bush's secretary of state, James Baker, which will present its recommendations after the November elections.

Those elections are another reason for urgency. If the Democrats capture the House of Representatives, as expected, they will be in a position to cut funding for the war if they are not listened to. Even if they fall short of an absolute majority in the Senate, there are now Republican senators signalling that they could side with the opposition if there is not a decisive rethink on Iraq. David Mack, a diplomat in the first Bush administration who helped rally Arab support for the Gulf War, said: "We are really at a point where any talk of victory is an illusion."

Mr Mack, who served as a consultant to the ISG, said he was expressing personal opinions that did not necessarily reflect the views of the panel, whose work is still classified. He insisted the Bush administration would have to redefine victory. It would have to give up its rhetoric about spreading democracy, as well as its aversion to talking to Syria or Iran - both central planks of the Bush Doctrine, which emphasises the muscular use of US power to isolate enemy "rogue regimes".

Success might then be achieved in the form of "an orderly exit from the country that doesn't make a bad situation worse".

Those involved with the Baker commission hope that its recommendations, coming from friends and camouflaged as tactical tweaks, could offer President Bush a face-saving way out of the current bloody impasse. But they concede there is no guarantee of a decisive change.

There is no consensus on the way out of Iraq among the president's critics while resistance to change is entrenched and led by Vice-President Dick Cheney."I know what the president thinks. I know what I think. And we're not looking for an exit strategy. We're looking for victory," Mr Cheney told Time magazine.

The counter-attack by Republican "realists" has been led by close confidants of George Bush Sr, injecting the generational tensions of a powerful dynasty into an already heated debate. "A future Shakespeare will have a lot to write about," a former official from the first Bush administration now working with the Baker commission, noted this week.

There have been Republican rebellions against the administration's Iraq policy before but they have failed to exert any influence. The rebels' open questioning of the rationale for the war was regarded as disloyal and they were quickly excluded from White House discussions.

By contrast, Mr Baker's loyalty had hitherto been unquestioned. He is a fellow Texan, and has long been the Bush family's fixer. He has abstained from second-guessing the decision to go to war, despite recent intense questioning, and played a role in drumming up foreign contributions to fund Iraqi development. He personally asked the president's permission before agreeing to chair the ISG.

Mr Clemons said Mr Baker was seeking to "provide camouflage for changing direction". Nervousness about the death toll in Iraq and worries about a debacle at the polls in November have led other former loyalists to break ranks in recent days, including Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, another Texan conservative, who said this week that she was willing to contemplate Iraq's partition, an idea dismissed by the White House as a "nonstarter".

Perhaps the most worrying development for the Bush team is the public loss of faith expressed by a powerful Republican loyalist, Senator John Warner, the head of the armed services committee with very close links to the military.

Senator Warner was instrumental in the creation of the ISG and is its most senior sponsor. He returned from his eighth trip to Iraq earlier this month and declared the situation was "markedly different" from earlier visits. It was a "very serious situation" that was "simply drifting sideways".

In the next few months, he warned the administration would have to ask itself: "Is there a change of course that we should take?"

The cautiousness with which this rebellion is proceeding is influenced not just by anxiety over alienating the president and entrenching resistance from Mr Cheney. It is also informed by an awareness that there are no good options left on the table.

The eight options: what Washington and London are discussing

1. British out now

One of the British diplomats involved in talks on Iraq policy said the UK, which has responsibility for the south of Iraq, "could go tomorrow almost ... It would not look pretty, but it is doable".

Against: British diplomats pinpoint three problems if the UK was to pull out immediately. One would be political: the US would not welcome being left virtually alone. The second is military: the US would no longer have a dependable force in the south. The third is security: without British forces in place, fighting between the various militia groups and the criminal gangs in Basra and elsewhere would intensify.

For: The British presence is part of the problem. If Basra, Amara and other places were to disintegrate after British forces leave, the FCO hopes Shia religious leaders and Iran, which has influence over the Shia, could quickly establish stability.

Likelihood: Not being seriously considered yet. Halving British forces next summer, with further reductions later on, is still the likeliest outcome.

2. US coalition out now

"We could pull out now and leave them to their fate," a Foreign Office official said. "But the place could implode." The advantage of this option would be to cut short the agony.

Against: A premature pull-out could precipitate an even more ferocious civil war. Faced with world outrage over the level of human rights abuses and carnage, the US might then have to consider going back in circumstances even worse than before.

For: The presence of US forces is making things worse. The insurgency would lose its patriotic justification. A pull-out might force the Iraqi parties and security forces to work together or face a descent into anarchy.

Likelihood: Such an early exit is unlikely. It would be an unpalatable humiliation for the Bush administration and most of its critics agree that a hasty withdrawal could ultimately oblige the troops to go back.

3. Phased withdrawal

This is the present policy, but any pull-out is contingent on Iraq developing its own security forces. But there are increasing calls in Washington and London for a timetable. A Foreign Office official said: "The date might possibly have to be secret." Otherwise it could encourage insurgents to step up attacks. During this stage, the US could pour in money for employment programmes.

Against: The risk of agreeing a secret date with the Iraqi government is that, as with much else in Iraq, the date would probably leak out anyway.

For: The prospect of the removal of its security blanket might force the Iraqi government to face up to the many issues it ignores at present, such as the rise in sectarian violence. It also allows more time for training the Iraqi army and trying to train and reform the police force, a policy that has so far proved to be slower than coalition forces had hoped.

Likelihood: Still the likeliest option.

4. Talk to Iran and Syria

There appears to have been virtual consensus in the Baker commission for talks with Iraq's two most difficult neighbours on the grounds that they must ultimately want stability but will not pursue it while excluded from negotiations. The FCO, which has an embassy in Tehran, is pushing for engagement too.

Against: Iran and Syria could make demands in return for help that the Bush administration would find hard to accept. Iran would, at a minimum, demand that the US stop calling for regime change. Syria could urge the US to put pressure on Israel to return the Golan Heights, lost in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. There is some question over whether either country could stop sectarian killings.

For: Whatever the limitations of their influence, the bloodshed is only likely to worsen until they are brought on board.

Likelihood: There may be too much resistance in the Bush administration to direct talks, but the US could well give the nod to negotiations between a sovereign Iraq and its powerful neighbours.

5. Iraqi strongman

The US and British governments have been disappointed so far with Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's elected prime minister who took over earlier this year, mainly over the reluctance of his Shia-dominated coalition to tackle Shia death squads. Washington and London could press for his replacement with a strongman at the head of a junta, such as Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister from 2004-05 - and roll back democracy.

Against: Ousting a democratic government, with its carefully crafted constitution, would amount to a scandalous policy failure. "I do not see that as an option for western democracies," a British official said. Allawi is treated with suspicion by religious Shias because he is secular and detested by Sunnis because he presided over the attack on Falluja.

For: Only a strong, secular Iraqi leader could break the sectarian deadlock and broker the kind of compromises over oil and regional autonomy that are essential to prevent civil war and keep the country together.

Likelihood: Not likely.

6. Break-up of Iraq

Iraq is moving towards a federal model that could result in its break-up. The Kurdish area to the north is virtually autonomous anyway. The Shia-dominated area stretching from Basra in the south to the holy cities of Kerbala and Najaf further north could form another bloc, leaving the Sunnis with much of the west and centre - mostly oil-free desert. Advocates of such partition talk about using coalition forces to escort minority populations across the ethnic divides to streamline the partition and working out a fair revenue-sharing formula for oil.

Against: The break-up would leave a power vacuum in the region, which Iran, Syria and Turkey could exploit. The partition of Iraq would not be easy. Baghdad, which has huge Sunni and Shia communities, could explode.

For: The sectarian killings are creating de facto partition. Military escorts for civilians displaced by the violence would at least reduce the death toll.

Likelihood: Events on the ground may make it inevitable.

7. Redeploy & contain

There are two variations. One is for US forces to leave populated areas and retreat to "super-bases" in the desert from where they could support Iraqi forces - something the army has already begun. An alternative would be for the US forces to move out of Iraq altogether and use bases in nearby countries.

Against: "Super-bases could be the worst of both worlds," argues Larry Diamond, a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. The troops would be too cut off from the streets to have much impact, but they would remain foreign occupiers. It could be difficult to persuade other Arab countries to provide bases, and once out, it will be harder going back. It could also be perceived as cutting and running.

For: US forces would no longer be in the firing line and with them gone, the motivation for many of the insurgents might evaporate. They would still be at hand to prop up the elected government.

Likelihood: Quite possible in the short term as the US tries to stem its casualties, but unlikely as a lasting solution.

8. One last push

This would involve an increase of troops in the short term in the hope of creating sufficient security to deliver economic gains and create confidence in the Iraqi government. This roughly is Senator John McCain's preferred option, but might also appeal to Mr Bush as it would not immediately require a policy U-turn.

Against: It might be too late to curb the escalating violence and it would be politically unpalatable at home. It could leave even more US forces stuck in the middle of a civil war.

For: Military experts have long said there are not enough coalition forces in Iraq to seal the borders against infiltration and stamp out sectarian killings. It would be a sign of backing for the Baghdad government and would force sectarian leaders to take it more seriously.

Likelihood: A final gamble by Mr Bush is not to be discounted. Senator McCain is a presidential frontrunner for 2008, but by then Iraq may look very different.


8. How Iraq came home to haunt America
For months doubts over Iraq have risen along with the death toll. Last week a tipping point was reached as political leaders in Washington and London began openly to think the unthinkable: that the war was lost
By Peter Beaumont, Edward Helmore and Gaby Hinsliff (from the Observer)

Colonel Tom Vail is planning a road trip around the United States. It is his last, sad duty before returning to his family from eastern Baghdad. For when the commander of the 4th Brigade of the 101st Airborne arrives back in the States, it will be with videos of the memorial services held in Baghdad for each of his fallen soldiers to give to the families of the dead men.

He knows that some of the families will not want to see him, and he understands. Grief works in different ways, he says. For others, however, it will be an opportunity to talk, to learn something, he hopes, of the inexplicable nature of their children's deaths.

So, when he has a moment, when he is not driving round the battlefield that is eastern Baghdad, Vail examines the map and plans his flights and his car hire. And he wonders at the reception he will receive - a messenger of death, bringing the war back from Iraq to the home front.

For when Vail and his soldiers return, it will be in the knowledge that the United States that they are going home to is not the one that they left. That in their year-long absence a seismic shift has occurred in support for the war in Iraq. And that the deaths that Colonel Vail must carry back with him to grieving families - deaths that once seemed to Americans to be a necessary cost - now seem to the majority a dreadful and pointless waste.

It will also be in the knowledge that the battle that they began with such confidence barely four months ago, to secure and then rebuild some of the most dangerous areas of the Iraqi capital, like the campaigns before, has failed.

With that failure the entire future of Iraq and the US and British-led occupation has been brought to a tipping point of enormous consequence not simply for Iraq and the region, but for the Bush and Blair administrations.

For despite a massive campaign involving the troops of Vail's unit and others, backed by thousands of Iraqi troops, the US military leadership in Baghdad has been forced to admit that attacks during the holy month of Ramadan have increased by 22 per cent, and that the US death toll for October, standing at 74 at the weekend, will be one of the deadliest for US troops since the invasion in 2003.

More worrying still is the assessment that both Sunni and Shia nationalist resistance movements have reached the level of being 'coordinated/consolidated' - able to reply to multinational offensives with their own 'push capability'.

This was admitted explicitly last week by the top US spokesman in Baghdad, General William Caldwell. 'We're finding insurgent elements, the extremists, are pushing back hard. They're trying to get back into those areas where Iraqi and US forces have targeted them,' he said. 'We're constantly going back in to do clearing operations.'

In a few short weeks, the US and British policy over Iraq has dramatically unravelled. In the US that policy has been summed up in the phrase 'stay the course', the message designed months ago by Republican strategist Karl Rove, as a stick with which to beat the Democrats in the critical midterm elections on 7 November. It was a simple formula intended to suggest that it was President Bush, and not those calling for a rethinking of the war, who was the patriot.

Now that message appears to be backfiring as many Republican candidates up for re-election on 7 November have sought to distance themselves from Bush's handling of the war.

It is an unravelling driven by the increasingly dire circumstances on the ground, which have seen a sharp escalation of the blood-letting as the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki weakens in the face of the challenge of the Shia militias.

It has been driven, too, by the criticisms voiced by senior military figures - both American and British - of the conduct of the war, and it has been accelerated by the most potent catalyst of all, the collapse in popular support for the handling of events in Iraq, most notably in the US. Recent polls have suggested that disapproval of Bush's handling of the war in Iraq is now hovering around 63-64 per cent.

The collapsing poll figures mean that suddenly it is not only the Democrats who are challenging the Bush administration's conduct of the war but Republican incumbents themselves, fearful that the White House's longstanding denial of the reality of the situation in Iraq will toss them out of power.

Republican strategists believe that in the House of Representatives 12 seats inevitably are doomed, with the Democrats needing only 15 seats to take the House. Privately, however, the same strategists concede that a loss of 18-25 seats is more likely. In the Senate, too, controlled by the Republicans for all but one of the last 12 years, the Republican hold is under threat.

The result has been a political fall-out that many now expect will pressure Bush - and by extension the UK - into yet another change of tactics over the conduct of the war. The question remaining is what policy could now deliver any more success?

That expectation of change has been driven by ever more visible criticism in the US media over a policy that many now believe is political poison.

It has not been helped by the comments of President Bush himself. He responded to an article by columnist Thomas Friedman which compared the present spike in violence in Iraq to the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War by appearing to accept the comparison.

'I don't believe that we can continue based on an open-ended, unconditional presence,' Senator Olympia Snowe, a centrist Maine Republican, told the Washington Post last week. 'I don't think there's any question about that, there will be a change.'

Snowe is not alone. Senator John Warner, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has also weighed into the fray after returning from a fact-finding mission to Iraq and stating, in sharp contradiction to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit last month, that the country was adrift and all options should be examined.

Most damning of all, however, were the comments of Richard Haass, a former Bush administration foreign policy official, who told reporters yesterday that the situation is reaching a 'tipping point' both in Iraq and in US politics.

'More of essentially the same is going to be a policy that very few people are going to be able to support,' said Haass, now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He added that the administration's current strategy - of a stable, democratic Iraq, within a politically feasible time frame - 'has virtually no chance of succeeding'.

This sense of a growing crisis has only been deepened by comments from the Iraq Study Group, chaired by the Bush family friend and former Secretary of State James Baker, which have made it abundantly clear that he does not believe that the present Iraq policy is working.

In a second uncomfortable comparison with Vietnam and the Tet offensive, some are now beginning to compare Baker's bilateral group with the 'three wise men' who advocated the change of US military policy in that war.

Baker has let it be known to Bush that he believes that what is required is a timetable for withdrawal. But that comes with its own problems.

'Jim's problem is that he wants a way to make clear to Maliki that we're leaving, but without signalling to the Shia and the Sunni that, if they bide their time, they can battle it out for Iraq,' one long-time national security expert told Friday's New York Times. 'How do you do that? Got me.'

If there is an answer to that question, then Deborah Pryce would like to know - and in a hurry. A popular Ohio congresswoman, a moderate Republican, Pryce's only political error may turn out to have been in getting too close to her party's leadership during the execution of a highly unpopular and expensive foreign war.

In November, she will probably leave office as decisively as she arrived in the Republican midterm sweep in 1994. Pryce would like to talk about local issues like the new control tower at Columbus airport, but the country is in alarm over the war in Iraq, the faltering economy and political sleaze in Washington. For Pryce, the fourth-ranking Republican in Congress who has not faced a serious challenge since she was elected in 1994, her seat, in the 15th district, is a microcosm of the national picture. For, as a touchstone state, what is true for Ohio is true nationally.

In Ohio all the talk is of war and broken government. Incumbent Republicans in all races - House, Senate and governorship - are behind by double digits. In the Senate campaign alone, the Republican national committee has cut campaign spending on its amiable candidate, Mike DeWine , and reallocated campaign money to other states such as Tennessee where victory is still a possibility. While other issues come and go on the front pages, war is the constant, the backdrop.

Once candidates such as Pryce could count on the 'soccer mums' renamed 'security mums' for the post-9/11 world. Once these women accepted the administration's explanation for war. Not any more. 'People are upset about our kids being killed in Iraq in a war that everyone now knows was started on false pretences,' said housewife Vicky Harman. 'Every day there's more information about the cover-ups, the efforts to misguide the public and - worst of all - their absolute lack of remorse.'

With the realities of Iraq as a 'new Vietnam' setting in, voters in the Midwest last week expressed a sense of political powerlessness. Julie Smith wanted to see 'the boys come home from Iraq' but didn't expect them to 'cause I know Bush is gonna do what he likes'.

If there is a hope of wide-ranging change in large quarters of the Republican Party and in Washington's political circles at the week's end it was not being articulated by the two men most closely associated with the war, Bush himself, and his closest lieutenant, the combative Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom many believe should be sacrificed for the errors of the war so far.

Ahead of a meeting with Vice-President Dick Cheney and the top American commanders in Iraq - George Casey and John Abizaid - Bush and Rumsfeld were still insisting that the goals remain unaltered: creating a country that can govern and defend itself 'that will be an ally in the war against these extremists'. By yesterday Bush was even more emphatic in his weekly radio address, insisting that, while the increase in violence was disappointing, 'our goal in Iraq is clear and unchanging: our goal is victory. What is changing are the tactics we use to achieve that goal.'

If anyone was left in any doubt, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also played down expectations of a major change when she briefed reporters while en route to Moscow. 'I would not read into this somehow that there is a full-scale push for a major re-evaluation (of Iraq strategy),' she said.

Perceptive analysts have noted, however, that while Bush has remained apparently robust, he has dropped his insistence that the end product of his policy is the creation of a 'flourishing democracy' at the heart of the Middle East to focus instead on the much more limited idea of a 'stable' Iraq. Now, the message from the White House and Pentagon is that, while tactics on the ground may be up for grabs, the overall strategy is not. None of which may be enough to save a Republican meltdown.

This considerable problem is being confronted by not only the disillusioned US electorate, but by Bush's allies as well. For it is not only in America that the implications of the unravelling of Bush's Iraq policy are being felt.

For if the situation is difficult for Bush, it is infinitely more complicated for his supposed ally, Tony Blair. Already wrongfooted by the outburst from the Chief of the General Staff , General Sir Richard Dannatt , Downing Street has spent the week struggling to stay on the right side of a constantly changing argument in Washington.

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett , who has spoken to Condoleezza Rice within the last few days, will indicate today that tactics were bound to change in the run-up to the US polls, but she insists that she does not detect 'that much of a change of pace or mood' in the Washington administration on Iraq. However, she admits there are ongoing discussions about the way forward: 'I think it is just people recognising how things are going and there are bound to be some areas where it would be easier if we were not there.' What was most striking, she said, was that 'in some areas we were part of the problem, in other areas we were not.'

The difficulty for the British government is that American policy on Iraq is now likely to be determined by the outcome of the November elections: if Bush does badly, an early exit becomes more likely, but if he does unexpectedly well there could even be a push to send more troops to Iraq to quell the insurgency.

As the junior partner in the coalition, Britain will inevitably be swept along by whatever new American policy emerges. But that policy remains unclear, leaving British politicians essentially playing for time until they establish what Bush is likely to do.

And Bush is not the only one with elections on his mind. If the midterm contest goes badly for the Republican Party, Labour minds will inevitably turn to the elections due here in May for local councils and the Scottish and Welsh assemblies. In Scotland particularly, Iraq is a hot political potato and Labour's two main opponents north of the border, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, are both highly critical of the war.

All of which, however, is academic for those in the killing fields of Iraq.

Ending the Iraq nightmare - the key points

A Partition

What it means
One of the options being looked at by James Baker and his team - asked by Bush to study the exit alternatives. Lines would be drawn across a map of Iraq dividing it into three autonomous regions - Kurdish in the north, Sunni in the middle and Shia in the south.

Consequences
Dividing Iraq along sectarian lines would exacerbate sectarian violence and lead to ethnic cleansing. It would also unequally split up Iraq's oil resources - and leave the Sunnis with little arable land - which would give opposing sides an economic reason to fight each other. Partition would be far from straightforward in heavily mixed communities, holy cities would be contested and Baghdad would probably explode.

Support
Outside powers such as Iran would find it easy to dominate the new entities. The militias are already creating a partition and more and more people are becoming displaced.

B Regional help

What it means
Sub-contracting problem - asking Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to step in.

Consequences
Risks drawing the regional players into a wider conflict that could engulf the Arab world. It could mean Bush facing demands from countries he regards as enemies in exchange for help. It's also debatable whether any of those countries would have influence to curb sectarian killings.

Support
It looks good on paper, Baker is very keen, but not popular in Washington. White House press secretary Tony Snow said it unlikely Bush administration would consider ending its ban on talks with Iran and Syria. 'We'd be very happy for them not to foment terror,' Snow said. 'But it certainly doesn't change our diplomatic stance towards either.'

C Immediate withdrawal

What it means
The cut-and-run option where the US-led coalition troops simply pull out overnight.

Consequences
Could worsen the chaos and enfeeble the struggling Iraq government and military. Danger of full-scale civil war and carnage, destabilising the region and leaving a failed state open to use by al-Qaeda. But it would stop UK and US soldiers dying.

Support
Bush will never be persuaded it is the right thing to do. The aim has always been to leave an Iraq that could govern itself. It would mean utter humiliation for his war on terror. The US would forever be blamed for the mess it left behind and could even be forced to intervene again in the future. Bush has been listening to Henry Kissenger who has told him cut and run is not an option and 'victory is the only meaningful exit strategy'.

D Phased withdrawal

What it means
'We notify the Iraqis that we're going to be drawing down a reasonable but careful percentage of our troops over a reasonable interval of months - for example 5 per cent every three months,' said Richard L Armitage, former presidential adviser. US General George W Casey has suggested Iraqi security forces would be ready to take over in 12-18 months. Views of whether it takes weeks or years vary but the pressure is on Bush - and Tony Blair - to produce a timetable.

Consequences
If the weak Iraqi government makes no progress in disarming the militias and death squads then the same results as immediate withdrawal. Insurgents would perceive it as a victory and move into the vacuum.

Support
Democrats winning control of one of the Houses of Congress would increase pressure for an end date to be set. Favoured by Britain and the subject of the row earlier this month engulfing General Sir Richard Dannatt's comments when he called for a swift pull-out of UK troops. Blair has also stressed a desire to leave but only when 'the job is done.'

International press: what they are saying around the world

Los Angeles Times
Tim Rutten, yesterday

The Bush administration's problems in Iraq have nothing to do with public relations and everything to do with the facts. American voters - a substantial majority of whom now recognise the war in Iraq as a mistake - will make their own decisions in November, but the real lesson concerning the American failure in south east Asia that the news media ought to hold in mind over and against all criticism - no matter how adroitly it's spun - can be summed up in one word: quagmire.

New York Sun
Daniel Freedman

Iraq is not like Vietnam, as the anti-war movement likes to say - ie, a failure. The reality is America only lost [in south east Asia] because the political leadership lost the resolve to back the troops. The crucial part now is to ensure American troops aren't abandoned as in Vietnam.

El Pais
'Impossible Victory', yesterday

All the alternatives Bush has put on the table to solve an increasingly deteriorating situation in Iraq are terrible. This war - and above all its bad management, even more so than at the beginning of the war- has finally turned into the focus of the campaign for the American Congress elections on 7 November. Even the president has now recognised its resemblance to the Vietnam war.

At this stage, the Bush administration is looking for a political escapade. But if the option were clear, they would have already opted for one.

Le Monde
'The strategy in Iraq puts the Congress elections at stake', 18 October

Will James Baker succeed in finding an exit strategy in Iraq's dead end for president George Bush? Three weeks before the Congress elections that some observers see as the 'referendum on Iraq', the former Secretary of State is omnipresent in the media, accrediting the idea that the change of policies in Iraq is perhaps less distant, as opposed to Bush's denials of change.

Mr Baker promotes this idea specially in his book, an autobiography where he shares his emotions as well as revealing his discovery of African-American cousins and his taste for hunting, a pastime he shares with the father of the current president.

Sydney Morning Herald
Leader, yesterday

The debate over Iraq policy in the US, Britain and Australia is being driven by bad news from Baghdad and increasingly hostile public opinion at home. It is good that this is forcing political leaders to review and adjust their strategies. It will be even better if it leads them to stop reviling their critics as traitors or cowards and instead explain the moral, political and military complexities of the Iraq situation. The case against a premature withdrawal should not rest on defence of an invasion that was launched partly on false pretences but, rather, on the new realities created by that invasion and its bungled aftermath. So dire are those realities that pulling out now would not only expose the Iraqis to the danger of even worse bloodshed in an outright civil war, but also present violent jihadists with a victory that would embolden them to further atrocities.

Washington Post
Colbert King, yesterday

There is a new Iraq emerging before our eyes. It is an Iraq that torments Christians, that indulges in unrelenting sectarian bloodbaths, that cheers for Hizbollah, that is no more a friend to Israel than is Iran, all despite the lies sold to the White House and Pentagon by self-serving, power-hungry Iraqi expatriates. The new Iraq is not what George W. Bush talks about. But that's the Iraq he's got. And, worst of all, that's the Iraq we are in.'

The Economist, London
Leader, yesterday

The only honest alternative is indeed probably just to go and let one side win. America did that in Vietnam and Britain did it in Palestine ... Vietnam turned out well enough, regional dominoes did not all fall and America went on to win the cold war anyway ... Maybe something similar will happen in Iraq, not least because the rival versions of theocracy on offer from Iran and al-Qaeda are nonsensical too. But just going would be a fantastic gamble, not only with America's global power and prestige but also with other people's lives. Better, still, to stay.


9. Stark Lessons From Iraq -- by Jim Hoagland (from The Washington Post)

The bloody chaos of Iraq under U.S. occupation is shaking Western governments into sobering reassessments of that conflict and of war itself. More urgently, some of these governments have launched tightly held contingency planning for the consequences of a possible American failure in Iraq.

"There will be no papers or staff meetings on that subject in our main ministries," one European senior official told me recently. "It would leak, and that would be disastrous. But our intelligence agencies have begun to work on where the terrorists would go post-Iraq. That is a threat we cannot ignore now."

The deepening doubts about America's commitment and strategy in Iraq that dominate polling for U.S. midterm elections have spread across the Atlantic in recent months as insurgency has metastasized into sectarian warfare between Sunnis and Shiites.

Those doubts have reached even into the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who needed to be reassured by a telephone call from President Bush last week that Maliki's faltering "national unity" government still has U.S. support. The commitment had been called into question by on-the-record and anonymous comments by members of the Iraq Study Group headed by former secretary of state Jim Baker.

But Bush's reassurances to the beleaguered Maliki do not dispel the gathering sense at home and abroad that the administration is belatedly engaged in a search for a political-economic exit strategy. Such a strategy would quickly reduce the role of U.S. combat troops in Iraq and gradually increase the economic involvement of other countries, including Iraq's neighbors.

The Baker group's political recommendations in late autumn will roughly coincide with the rollout of a U.N.-sponsored International Compact for Iraq that would offer new reconstruction aid and debt relief if Maliki undertakes substantial economic reforms. In the view of international officials, new laws on oil exploration, production and revenue sharing are urgent and central to the reforms and to national reconciliation efforts.

But military leaders and diplomats in Western capitals are not waiting for the Baker and U.N.-sponsored efforts to conclude before they assess the mistakes, poor strategy and changing conditions of warfare that have brought U.S. forces face to face with the bitter prospect of having to withdraw, mission unaccomplished.

The glaring contrast between the lightning victory over Iraq's conventional army in 2003 and the failure of U.S. forces to stabilize postwar Iraq is Topic A in these circles. It has become the subject of official planning exercises, classified Pentagon briefings, and public calls for retraining and reequipping Western forces to fight new forms of insurgency and terrorism fueled by extremist Islamic ideology.

The need for changes in practice and doctrine was reinforced by Israel's inconclusive July-August war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, a classic guerrilla force that also possesses a strategic missile arsenal capable of damaging and shutting down entire Israeli cities.

"Insurgency is here to stay," Jeb Nadaner, deputy assistant defense secretary for stability operations, said at a recent U.S.-British conference in Washington on reorganizing governments to fight irregular warfare.

Other speakers -- including conference organizer John Hillen, the State Department's top political-military expert -- spoke bluntly to the group about the continuing failure of the U.S. military and civilian bureaucracies to adapt to an era in which armor and infantry battles occupy only a small space on the overall battlefield and are in any event too costly to be carried on for very long.

Across the Atlantic, similar thinking is underway in defense ministries and force headquarters. "Classical warfare is probably dead. It is no longer a cost-effective tool to achieve political or economic goals," Gen. Vincent Desportes, the head of France's Doctrine Center for Forces Employment, wrote in a recent study of conflict in a post-Iraq-invasion world.

Instead, conventional wars "mutate very quickly into asymmetrical clashes, which do last," Desportes continued. "The decisive phase is no longer the initial short phase of intervention, but clearly the phase of long stabilization which follows it."

Mao Zedong made famous the idea that civilian populations are the sea in which guerrillas swim. But today's insurgencies use civilian populations as their most important weapon. Britain's Gen. Rupert Smith made the point in a recent book that military forces must be prepared to fight within and for populations, which previously have been seen by generals as little more than impediments to battle.

The extent to which U.S. forces were unprepared for insurgency and sectarian warfare in Iraq has become painfully apparent. The lessons they are learning -- which have become prohibitively costly for Americans and Iraqis -- must never again be forgotten.

(jimhoagland@washpost.com)


11. Bush Abandons Phrase 'Stay the Course' on Iraq – by JIM RUTENBERG and DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON -- The White House said Monday that President Bush was no longer using the phrase “stay the course” when speaking about the Iraq war, in a new effort to emphasize flexibility in the face of some of the bloodiest violence there since the 2003 invasion.

“He stopped using it,” said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary. “It left the wrong impression about what was going on and it allowed critics to say, ‘Well, here’s an administration that’s just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is,’ when, in fact, it is the opposite.”

Mr. Bush used the slogan in a stump speech on Aug. 31, but has not repeated it for some time. Still, Mr. Snow’s pronouncement was a stark example of the complicated line the White House is walking this election year in trying to tag Democrats as wanting to “cut and run” from Iraq, without itself appearing wedded to unsuccessful tactics there.

Democrats have increasingly pressed a case this fall contending that Republicans are stubbornly proposing to “stay the course” in a failing effort to stanch violence in Iraq — an approach that strategists in both parties consider to have been fairly successful, especially as violence has continued to mount in Baghdad.

In the last few weeks a number of Republican lawmakers and party elders have also come forward to express doubts about whether the administration’s approach to stabilizing Iraq is succeeding and to suggest new strategies.

Mr. Bush and his aides have met those complaints with a renewed emphasis on adaptability for the United States’ war plan. Mr. Bush has stressed — as he did in an interview with ABC News on Sunday — that he is “not patient forever” and expects the Iraqis to take more responsibility in securing their own country.

In the same vein, administration officials are heightening the emphasis on setting milestones for Iraq to take over responsibility for ensuring security while disbanding sectarian militia groups.

Bush administration officials on Monday provided new details of their efforts to devise benchmarks for measuring the Baghdad government’s progress in the coming months toward assuming a larger role in securing the country.

Mr. Snow said the issue of benchmarks had come up cursorily during recent discussions with Mr. Bush; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ; Gen. John P. Abizaid , the top American commander in the Middle East; Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Iraq.

He added that the Bush administration was not presenting any ultimatums to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Malaki’s government or tying goals to United States troop commitments.

Mr. Snow was commenting on a report in The New York Times on Sunday that said the Bush administration was drafting a timetable with Iraqi officials for dealing with the militias and achieving other political, economic and military benchmarks aimed at stabilizing the country.

The Times article quoted several senior officials anonymously as saying the Bush administration would consider changes in military strategy and other steps if Iraq balked at the benchmarks or failed to meet the most critical timetables.

Mr. Rumsfeld said Monday that the benchmarks under discussion included projections on when Iraq might be able to take control of more of the country’s 18 provinces. Only two provinces are under full Iraqi security administration, though officials say they hope the number will rise to six or seven by the end of the year.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld said the goal of the discussions was to produce a “way ahead” so that “their government can have a set of tasks that they need to do to get prepared to assume the responsibility for governing their country and providing security for their country.”

The goal, he added, was for both sides to agree on what he called “projections” for when Iraq might be able to take on these tasks.

“My guess is that you might find that in no case will you find a specific date” for assuming a particular task, he said. But, he added, “You might find a month, or you might find a spread of two or three months, a period where they think they might be able to do it.”

Mr. Bush, in discussing at a news conference on Oct. 11 the meaning of the phrase “stay the course,” also refused to be pinned down.

“Stay the course means keep doing what you’re doing,” he said. “My attitude is, don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working; change.”

He added: “Stay the course also means don’t leave before the job is done. And that’s — we’re going to get the job done in Iraq. And it’s important that we do get the job done in Iraq.”

YEAH, RIGHT.