Oy, oy, Iraq - Bush the dunderhead will stay the course, actually believes success is possible

1. How violence is forging a brutal divide in Baghdad
Neighbourhoods have become no-go areas as Sunni and Shia militias engage in a grab for land and the domination of government
Ned Parker and Ali Hamdani in Baghdad/Timesonline

Baghdad is like a jungle, the grey-bearded Shia militia leader said. “It is a savage place where the wild animals fight for their piece of territory. Each animal wants to take more land than the other.”

Abu Bakr takes his job as a commander in al-Mahdi Army extremely seriously. In Sadr City, he organises fighters at checkpoints to defend the Shia enclave from Sunni extremists in neighbouring districts.

His foot soldiers, followers of the Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, are vigilant in protecting their territory. “The Takfiris [Sunni extremists] want to use Sunni areas as a base to attack the Shia and all of Iraq. They want to make Iraq a country for al-Qaeda,” Abu Bakr cautioned.

Across the Tigris, in western Baghdad, Abu Obeida, an al-Qaeda member, sits in his house in the Sunni district of Amariya. The 33-year-old has the air of one under siege. He talks about preparing to confront al-Mahdi Army and rails against them for murdering innocent civilians. He makes no mention of the car bomb attacks that his group has carried out against the Shia over the past three years.

“What we are trying to do right now is to prevent the expansion of these militias, so we are keeping our forces on the outskirts of our neighbourhoods to prevent them from invading,” Abu Obeida said. “Most important right now is for our groups not to lose our areas.”

More and more, Baghdad is splintering into Shia and Sunni enclaves that are increasingly no-go areas for anyone from outside. The trend is fuelled by the ugliest sectarianism. It also reflects a crude power grab, with both sides egged on by political parties aiming to maximise their clout in the Iraqi Government by dominating as much of the capital as possible. The result is that since February, when Sunnis bombed the golden-domed mosque in Samarra, a Shia shrine, 146,322 individuals have been displaced in Baghdad, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

The pattern is so pronounced that the US military has drawn up a new map of Baghdad to reflect its ethno-sectarian fault lines. Published here for the first time, it lists the mixed neighbourhoods considered to be most explosive. Four of the five are on the western bank of the Tigris, called Karkh, where mixed neighbourhoods are still prevalent. Predominently Shia Kadhamiya and the largely Sunni areas of Qadisiya, Amariya and Ghazaliya have become the deadliest battlegrounds, according to US forces.

The violent struggle for neighbourhoods goes well beyond a fight among outlaws. Armed groups belonging to the parliament’s two main Sunni and Shia political blocs fuel much of the violence, according to senior Iraqi officials. “There is a very clear connection between some of the displacements caused by armed groups in some neighbourhoods in and around Baghdad and the political parties that are in the Council of Representatives,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi National Security Adviser, told The Times .

Mr al-Rubaie refused to name the culprits. Officials have blamed the Islamic Party, the biggest Sunni political party in the country, and the Mahdi militia belonging to Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, whose movement has 32 parliament seats, the largest number in the ruling Shia coalition.

“The religious and political leaders don’t seem to have the will to stop it. The Islamic Party is involved. AlMahdi Army does it. These people are fighting each other,” Mahmoud Osman, a Kurd Parliament member, said.

A Shia government official said that the Islamic Party and the Muslim Scholars Association (MSA), the largest grouping of Sunni mosques in the country, had been working in tandem with the insurgent group the 1920 Revolution Brigade to force the Shia out of western Baghdad.

A US military officer acknowledged that the fight for political power was one of the main factors causing Sunni and Shia families to be evicted from their homes. “Control equals money and power. The more districts your ethnic group controls the more potential influence you will have in the Council of Representatives and the Government of Iraq through legal and non-legal means,” he said. He confirmed that al-Mahdi Army and the 1920 Revolution Brigade were main players in the campaign to cleanse neighbourhoods.

The growing number of danger zones has turned their metropolis into a place of dysfunction for ordinary Baghdadis. University students do not dare go to the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya to pick up their academic transcripts from the Higher Education Ministry’s registrar office; doctors stay away from Baghdad’s largest hospital, Medical City, afraid of armed groups. Many government ministers no longer head to their offices outside the green zone.

On Palestine Street, one of the main boulevards leading into Sadr City, al-Mahdi Army fighters set up fake checkpoints. Sunnis claim that the militants kidnap young Sunni men and kill them in the name of protecting their community, but for the innocent it is another front line to dodge.

The Sunni-Shia violence has become so bad that Major-General William Caldwell said that the US military had established ethno-sectarian fault lines throughout the city. “We monitor them very closely, with the Government of Iraq security forces, because those are very mixed neighbourhoods.”

In the past two weeks, fighting in western Baghdad between al-Mahdi Army and Sunni groups has caused Shia families to be evicted from Ghazaliya and al-Adal; Sunni families have been forced out of Jihad, Huriya and al-Ammal. On Baghdad’s eastern bank, called Rusafa, the mainly Sunni bloc of Adhamiya and its satellite neighbourhood al-Fadl are locked in a mortal battle with Sadr City and its surrounding Shia districts.

In a report released in October, the Brookings Institution, the Washington-based think-tank, named the same political groups as being suspected of fuelling the sectarian cleansing campaign in Iraq. It also mentioned another important Shia partner in the government, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

“The violence is neither spontaneous nor popular. Displaced people view the most extreme religious fronts – the office of Moqtada al-Sadr and SCIRI on the Shia side and the MSA and the Islamic Party on the Sunni side — as the main drivers of sectarian displacement,” the October report said. “The displacements clearly help further the political agenda of these extremist groups.”

For now, the capital’s battleground remains western Baghdad, where the Sunnis have their biggest footprint. “Our main task now is not to lose this part of the city,” Abu Obeida said.

In turn, some Shia are afraid that the Sunnis are trying to hold Kadhamiya hostage — in the way that Adhamiya is surrounded by the Shia in eastern Baghdad.

Lameeya Muhammad, 36, moved to the western Baghdad neighbourhood of Huriya two months ago, after her husband and two children were evicted from the nearby Sunni enclave of al-Adal. Last week, when long-haired Sunni gunmen made a raid into Huriya, men including Lameeya’s husband picked up their guns and traded fire from rooftops. The shoot-out was the final straw for six Sunni families still living on their street. They fled after the battle. “I’m sure they realised that al-Mahdi Army would come and take revenge,” Mrs Muhammad said.

Her husband, who refused to give his name, was depressed by what had happened. “We have no problems with our neighbours at all,” he said. “It’s all about these parties and political groups who are fighting each other through locals. You watch them at the parliament and you see how they are fighting each other in the sessions, so you understand how they are fighting each other out in the streets but we are the victims. ”

City of the displaced:
6.7m : the population of Baghdad
146,322: Baghdad residents displaced since February
38,766 : displaced persons living in Baghdad (as of December 11)
85 per cent of displaced living in Baghdad come from within the city
72 per cent of displaced living in Baghdad are Shia
27 per cent of displaced living in Baghdad are Sunni
17 per cent of displaced living in Baghdad are Yazidi
Source: International Organisation for Migration


2. Corruption: the 'second insurgency' costing $4bn a year
One third of rebuilding contracts under criminal investigation
Julian Borger in Washington, David Pallister/Guardian

The Iraqi government is in danger of being brought down by the wholesale smuggling of the nation's oil and other forms of corruption that together represent a "second insurgency", according to a senior US official. Stuart Bowen, who has been in charge of auditing Iraq's faltering reconstruction since 2004, said corruption had reached such levels that it threatened the survival of the state.

"There is a huge smuggling problem. It is the No 1 issue," Mr Bowen told the Guardian. The pipelines that are meant to take the oil north have been blown up, so the only way to export it is by road. "That leaves it vulnerable to smuggling," he said, as truckers sell their cargoes on the black market.

Mr Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Sigir), cites Iraqi figures showing that the "virtual pandemic" of corruption costs the country $4bn (£2.02bn) a year, and some of that money goes straight to the Iraqi government's enemies. A US government report has concluded that oil smuggling abetted by corrupt Iraqi officials is netting insurgents $100m a year, helping to make them financially self-sustaining.

"Corruption is the second insurgency, and I use that metaphor to underline the seriousness of this issue," Mr Bowen said. "The deputy prime minister, Barham Saleh, told Sigir this summer that it threatens the state. That speaks for itself."

The Bush administration's strategy in Iraq hinges on the survival of the government run by Nuri al-Maliki, despite US reservations about the prime minister's readiness or ability to confront extremists in his own Shia community.

But Mr Bowen's office has found that the insurgents and militias have also been abetted by US incompetence. A recent audit by his inspectors found that more than 14,000 guns paid for out of US reconstruction funds for Iraqi government use could not be accounted for. Many could be in the hands of insurgents or sectarian death squads, but it will be almost impossible to prove because when the US military handed out the guns it noted the serial numbers of only about 10,000 out of a total of 370,000 US-funded weapons, contrary to defence department regulations.

Jim Mitchell, a Sigir spokesman, said: "The practical effect is that when a weapons cache is found you're deprived of the intelligence of knowing if they were US-provided, which might allow you to follow the trail to the bad guys."

Mr Bowen's inspectors are among the few US civilian officials who still venture beyond the fortified bounds of the Green Zone in Baghdad into the rest of Iraq, to see how $18bn of American taxpayers' money is being spent. Much of the money has been wasted. Sigir officials have referred 25 cases of fraud to the justice department for criminal investigation, four of which have led to convictions, and about 90 more are under investigation.

A culture of waste, incompetence and fraud may be one legacy the occupiers have passed on to Iraq's new rulers more or less intact. Mr Bowen's office found that nearly $9bn in Iraqi oil revenues could not be accounted for. The cash was flown into the country in shrink-wrapped bundles on military transport planes and handed over by the ton to Iraqi ministries by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) run by Paul Bremer, a veteran diplomat. The money was meant to demonstrate the invaders' good intentions and boost the Iraqi economy, which Mr Bremer later insisted had been "dead in the water". But it also fuelled a cycle of corruption left over from Saddam Hussein's rule.

"We know it got to the Iraqis, but we don't know how it was used," Mr Bowen later told Congress.

In the Hillah region a defence department contract employee and two lieutenant colonels were found to have steered $8m in contracts to a US contractor in return for bribes. The Pentagon contract employee, Robert Stein, pleaded guilty earlier this year, admitting he and his co-conspirators received more than $1m in cash, help with laundering the funds, jewellery, cars and sex with prostitutes. Stein also admitted that they simply stole $2m from the construction fund, accounting for the money with receipts from fictitious construction companies.

Hillah just happened to be the district Mr Bowen's inspectors examined in depth. It is still far from clear how much reconstruction money has gone missing around the whole country.

A potentially far more serious problem has been the way the US government decided to give out reconstruction contracts. It split the economy into sectors and shared them out among nine big US corporations. In most cases the contracts were distributed without competition and on a cost-plus basis. In other words the contractors were guaranteed a profit margin calculated as a percentage of their costs, so the higher the costs, the higher the profits. In the rush to get work started the contracts were signed early in 2004. In many cases work did not get under way until the year was nearly over. In the months between, the contractors racked up huge bills on wages, hotel bills and restaurants.

According to a Sigir review published in October, Kellogg, Brown and Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former company) was awarded an oil industry repair contract in February 2004 but "direct project activity" did not begin until November 19. In that time KBR's overhead costs were nearly $53m. In fact more than half the company's $300m project costs from 2004-06 went on overheads, the audit found.

Iraq also represented a grey zone beyond the reach of the US civil courts. KBR was found to have overcharged the US military about $60m for fuel deliveries, but that did not stop it winning more government contracts.

A California company, Parsons, had its contract terminated this year after it was found to have finished only six of more than 140 primary healthcare centres it was supposed to build, after two years work and $500m spent. However, the contract was ended "for convenience", meaning Parsons was paid in full. In a police college Parsons built for $75m in Baghdad the plumbing was so bad that urine and excrement rained down from the toilets on to the police cadets. Parsons left a sub-contractor to do repairs but in general there is little punitive action that can be taken for shoddy work.

Part of the reason big US contractors have been able to get away with so much is that there has been limited proper supervision. CPA employees were picked not for their financial expertise but for their political loyalty.

Mr Bowen would have passed the test. He campaigned for George Bush in Texas and was one of the small army of Republican lawyers called in to Florida in 2000 to oversee the vote recounts on Mr Bush's behalf. When he started the job in March 2004 few expected he would do anything to embarrass the administration.

However, Mr Bowen has emerged as the scourge of the big corporations who are among the Republican party's biggest donors. Earlier this year a clause extending his mandate was stripped from a military spending bill just before a vote. Sigir, however, seems to have been saved by the Democratic victory in last month's elections.

Mr Bowen bristles at the suggestion that Mr Bush might have had a hand in the attempt to close his office. "I'm doing exactly what the president expects me to do," he said.


3. Runaway Inflation, Widespread Unemployment, Death Squads, Malnutrition, Blackouts, Ethnic Cleansing ... and Next Year Will Be Worse!
The Pentagon Measures the Chaos in Iraq
By WINSLOW T. WHEELER/Counterpunch

The Pentagon's new report on " Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq " was widely covered by the press. Many of the newspaper articles described what the report stated about the increase in violence in Iraq (summarized by the reported 22 percent increase in weekly attacks) and continuing efforts to train Iraqi security forces (and the ongoing frustrations, such as absenteeism as high as 50 percent when units are ordered to combat outside their domestic areas).

However, most articles did not address other deteriorating conditions in a region that is becoming less a nation-state and more a locus for ethnic, religious, criminal, and political conflict. That other data in the report gives the reader a sense of what life for Iraqi citizens is like these days. Consider, for example, the following from the DOD report:

The victims of the increasing attacks are mostly Iraqi civilians, not "coalition" (U.S.) military personnel.

Corruption and drug trafficking are increasing.

"Runaway inflation" has grown 53 percent over the past year.

Official estimates of unemployment range from 13 to 18 percent, but those data are understood to significantly understate the problem.

Electrical power generation is approximately half of demand. It is worse in Baghdad where civilians get power only 6 to 7 hours per day.

The government does not know how much clean water is delivered to Iraqis.

Civilians suffering from malnutrition range from 14 to 26 percent, depending on the province.

The numbers of refugees fleeing the violence are immense: 700,000 have fled to Jordan; 600,000 to Syria; 100,000 to Egypt; 40,000 to Lebanon, and 54,000 to Iran. Over 3,000 refugees per day are now appearing in Syria and Jordan.

In the last 10 months, 460,000 Iraqis have become "internally displaced" as they flee regional violence or are ethnically "cleansed."

Personal loyalties, such as tribal, sectarian, or political, are growing stronger than to Iraq as a nation.

The civilian population is losing confidence in the ability of the Iraq government to address security problems. In August 2006, 47 percent of the population had confidence in the ability of the government to protect citizens; by October 2006, that had declined to 36 percent. Significantly, much of the decline is occurring in the Shiite regions of the south of the country that comprises 80 percent of the total population.

Sixty percent of the population believes overall conditions are worsening: i.e. that the next DOD report will be worse.

Meanwhile, the newspapers are also reporting that the White House, and some in Congress, are contemplating a temporary "surge" in U.S. military deployments, numbering somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000. Perhaps more significantly, a major target of these deployments might be the Mahdi Army, the largest Shiite sectarian militia led by Muqtada al-Sadr, who controls a significant faction in the Iraqi national legislature and who is one of the most politically popular figures in Iraq.

If so, conditions are not about to improve in Iraq; the 60 percent of the Iraqi population who believe they have not yet seen the worst appear to be prescient.

(Winslow T. Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information and author of The Wastrels of Defense . Over 31 years, he worked for US Senators from both political parties and the Government Accountability Office on national security issues. He can be contacted at: winslowwheeler@comcast.net)


5. Sadr Army is called top threat in Iraq
A Pentagon report cites the danger of the Shiite cleric's militia.
By Julian E. Barnes/LA Times

WASHINGTON — Armed militiamen affiliated with radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr pose the gravest danger to the security and stability of Iraq, surpassing Sunni Arab insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists, a new Defense Department report to Congress says.

The finding represents the military's strongest characterization of the danger posed by Sadr and is among the conclusions of a quarterly report to Congress that chronicles the instability in Iraq and record level of sectarian violence.

In the last three months, the number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops and Iraqi civilians rose 22%, and the number of U.S. casualties grew 32%, the Pentagon assessment says.

As attacks have risen, the confidence of the Iraqi people has fallen, with fewer saying in surveys that they thought their government could protect them and more agreeing that civil war was likely.

The conclusion that Sadr-related militiamen posed the chief threat to the country's security came after the U.S. military had complained for months that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, had been unable to address armed Shiite groups and had obstructed American efforts to confront Sadr.

It also cast new light on a deteriorating situation that President Bush continued to blame in large part on Al Qaeda.

The dour Pentagon report came hours after Robert M. Gates was sworn in as the 22nd secretary of Defense with a pledge to extract frank assessments from military leaders and deliver plain advice to the president.

"You have asked for my candor and my honest counsel at this critical moment in our nation's history, and you will get both," Gates said.

An introduction to the Pentagon's quarterly Iraq report to Congress praises the Iraqi government for taking greater responsibility for the country. But the assessment also reflects frustration over the inability of the government to improve the economic situation or reconcile sectarian factions.

"The failure of the government to implement concrete actions in these areas has contributed to a situation in which, as of October 2006, there were more Iraqis who expressed a lack of confidence in their government's ability to improve the situation than there were in July 2006," the report says.

The report says the government has nearly reached its original goal of training 325,000 security personnel but that 45,000 police and army troops have been killed or wounded or have quit.

It also notes that a third of the active force is on approved leave at any time. More disturbing, the desertion rate of Iraqi soldiers increases to more than 50% when Iraqi units are deployed outside their areas of operation.

The Iraqi government has been unable to fulfill its promise to move extra battalions to Baghdad, and American commanders in the capital have cited the lack of forces as one reason death squads from warring sects have operated unchecked.

The failure of a growing number of Iraqi security personnel to contain the violence suggests that, in the short term, the U.S. strategy of replacing American troops with Iraqi security forces has not worked.

U.S. commanders say Iraqi security forces have improved — particularly in their leadership — but that the violence they are trying to combat has grown much worse.

"The violence has escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace," said Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We have to get ahead of the violence cycle and break that continuous chain of sectarian violence. That is the premier challenge facing us."

From August until November, there were an average of 959 overall attacks on troops and civilians each week — including an average of 648 against U.S. and coalition forces — up from 784 attacks from May to August.

"We know what we have to do," Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of Defense for international security, said in a briefing with reporters. "We and the Iraqi government have to contain sectarian violence and bolster the institutions of national unity."

At the ceremony for Gates, Bush spoke about the danger of extremists and radicals in Iraq, although he did not mention Al Qaeda specifically, as he had in recent meetings with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Maliki. But the Pentagon report makes it plain that sectarian violence is the greatest challenge to American forces and the Iraqi government.

Although there are many armed groups, the report says the most powerful is the Al Mahdi army, a militia nominally loyal to Sadr.

The group that had "the greatest negative affect on the security situation in Iraq is [Al Mahdi], which has replaced Al Qaeda as the most dangerous accelerant of potentially self-sustaining sectarian violence in Iraq," the report says.

Rodman said that assessment was an acknowledgment that Al Qaeda in Iraq's bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February had touched off a cycle of sectarian fighting that threatened the stability of the Iraqi government.

"It is a way of saying the sectarian violence is more significant than the insurgency," Rodman said.

"The sectarian violence shakes the structure of a government whose unity is a crucial factor."

The report stops short of calling the sectarian conflict a civil war.

The Al Mahdi army has not been officially declared a "hostile" organization by the United States and Iraq, a designation that would allow American forces to confront the militia on sight.

U.S. troops battled Sadr's forces in 2004, and an Iraqi judge issued an arrest warrant for the cleric, who eventually was persuaded to support the political process.

Sattler suggested that the effort to improve security in Baghdad had failed in part because the military was unable to move into the Sadr City neighborhood in Baghdad and confront the militia.

"As the forces moved forward, they were not able to go in and neutralize Sadr City," Sattler said.

Military officials are wrestling with whether they need to mount a combat offensive against militias loyal to Sadr.

Sattler and Rodman avoided discussing an offensive against the militias but said the policy was under review.

Gates is expected to take charge of the review. Although he has offered no hint of his policy preference, he said failure in Iraq would be a "calamity."

"All of us want to find a way to bring America's sons and daughters home again," Gates said. "But as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come."

The Iraqi government has assumed responsibility for the security of two provinces, one of the report's findings highlighted by Rodman and Sattler.

Three more provinces, in the Kurdish north, may be turned over by the end of the year, the report says.

Army Lt. Col. Chris Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said Najaf in the south would be turned over Wednesday. Rodman said several more provinces were ready to be turned over to Iraqi control next year.

In October, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, said his goal was to turn over "six or seven provinces" by year-end.

A military officer in Baghdad said that goal would probably be missed, but not by much.

"I would be surprised if six provinces had been handed over by Dec. 31," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. "But I would not be surprised if eight or nine [provinces] had been transferred by Jan. 30."

(julian.barnes@latimes.com)


6. Bush Can't Kick the Habit -- by Robert Scheer/Truthdig.com

Here we go again: A new secretary of defense and yet another call for ending the war in Iraq by escalating it. What are they smoking in the Bush White House?

Even as government statistics now show marijuana is America's No. 1 cash crop, it is important to remember that militarism is the most dangerous drug threatening our sanity. Yet even formerly sober folks - first Colin Powell and now new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - get a contact high from cozying up to the walking hallucinogen that is our president.

Succumbing to the Bush fantasy that freedom is fertilized by firepower, a vision that has mucked up Iraq beyond recognition, Gates told CBS that "as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for generations to come."

This from a man who recently made sense, during his confirmation hearings, when he told members of Congress that we are not winning this war, despite having committed, proportionally, as many troops as we did in Vietnam. But now, as a rising chorus of obsessed hawks calls for a "surge" in U.S. troop deployment in Iraq - a call echoed even by some prominent Democrats - Gates endorses the staying-the-course strategy for compounding the Iraq failure rejected by the voters. A member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) who had apparently supported its unanimous findings that the military strategy was bankrupt is suddenly blinded by Bush's Iraq victory myopia.

In a sign of just how out there Bush is on Iraq, The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff are in "unanimous disagreement" with "White House officials aggressively promoting the concept.... [T]he Joint Chiefs think the White House, after a month of talks, still does not have a defined mission [in Iraq]."

All this despite the fact that the ISG report correctly underscored that the real failures in the Mideast have clearly been political, not military. The accurate subtext of the report is that the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq is the key source of chaos in the region - inflaming religious fanaticism from Beirut to Baghdad and leaving the United States dependent on the tyrants in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to now bail us out.

So with Bush rejecting the sage advice of a commission headed by his father's secretary of state to cut our losses is there any hope the Democrats who now control Congress will stop playing the role of enabler to these war junkies? After all, it was the Democratic congressional leadership that provided Bush with bipartisan cover for his irrational "anti-terrorism" invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Some, like John Kerry, now recognize that folly, and even Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, in her appearance on NBC's "Today" show Monday, finally expressed her regrets for supporting the war and opposed a "surge" in U.S. troops for Iraq.

But other Democrats continue to play the dangerous game of supporting Bush's escalation. Particularly alarming were the remarks on Sunday of incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid endorsing a buildup as long as it aims at getting the troops home by 2008: "If the commanders on the ground said this is just for a short period of time, we'll go along with that."

Reid's strategy is as obvious as it is opportunistic: This is a Republican war, goes the thinking, and the Dems will give the Republicans all the rope they need to hang themselves in '08. This seems a deeply cynical position, when you consider that the Pentagon just announced that attacks on American and Iraqi targets are at their highest levels, with a 22 percent leap from just this summer. The difference between taking a position and positioning oneself is what determines leadership; if the Dems fail to provide real leadership on ending this war, they will deservedly lose the next election.

The convenient lie behind all of this is that U.S. military occupation is the indispensable agent of Mideast enlightenment. No, we have become the enablers of Iraqi madness, be it in the form of torture or the ascendancy of religious tyranny in Iraq, where daily life has been reduced to an unmitigated horror.

Yet, like a junkie who needs one more hit to get his life in order, Bush is hooked on the drug of military might. If the Democrats continue to feed his dangerous habit they will only help Bush visit greater mayhem upon Iraq while undermining the core values of our own country.


7. Done With Bonaparte -- by David Michael Green/opednews.com

We’ve seen this stuff before.

Caligula. Nero. George III. Louis XVI and his dear Marie. Wilhelm II (yes, he really did say, “If only someone had told me beforehand that England would take up arms against us!”).

Now comes Bushleague II to remind us again why we’ve opted for a meritocratic democracy over monarchical dynasties. The wrong son of the wrong family, he has proven yet once more that genetics is a crap shoot. Sooner or later you’re gonna get a big bummer of a king.

But there’s big, and then there’s big. In the past, these fools could only be expected to liquidate people by the tens of millions. But in the nuclear era, the prospects for going awry take on planetary proportions. Right on cue, Seymour Hersh is reporting on Bush
administration plans to nuke Iran.

Sigh.

Sometimes it’s just hard to know where to start with these guys. But then sometimes I’ve also wondered if that wasn’t their very strategy: Grab the reins of power and blow the doors off of everything all at once, leaving the hapless liberals scrambling to defend Social Security, reproductive rights, the Supreme Court, civil rights, civil liberties, the environment and a host of formerly sacrosanct foreign policy pillars, all at the same time.

Fortunately, there are some remaining vestiges of democracy in America, even after 25 years of bludgeoning by the New Right (aka, the old wrong). That means we still have a prayer of surviving Bad King George and his court of sick jesters. And we’re even making progress.

Wanna know how far we’ve come? Two quotes say it all. In the summer of 2002, the Bush junta was at the apogee of its power. And arrogance. This was when Ron Suskind interviewed an unnamed “senior advisor” to the king (my bet is Rasput... er, Rove), who
lectured the journalist and we other hapless members of “what we call the reality-based community” thusly, correcting our foolish reliance on superfluous concepts like basing solutions on the “judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Those lines are as jaw-droppingly, breathtakingly, fall-off-the-chairingly astonishing to read today as they were the first time I laid eyes on them. But now they are a lot less frightening. You see, there were two ways we could have gone from that moment. Down
one path, we survive, even retaining the constitutional gifts of the Founders with us. Down the other, the imperial fabricators would have been powerful enough to prevail over reality itself, and American democracy would have become just another chapter for the history books. It was close, too (and we’re not even necessarily home yet). Had Iraq gone swimmingly, the Creature from Crawford might have had carte blanche to dismantle the remaining characteristics of this country which once made it a special place.

This could well be the supreme irony in all of history. Seriously. Think about it – it is not only Iranians, Syrians, Cubans and Venezuelans who can thank their lucky stars for the Iraqi resistance which has ground the American military machine down to near its breaking point. It is not too much to say, as well, that these same fighters also saved American democracy – for Bush’s success in Iraq would surely have meant democracy’s demise here at home. Undoubtedly, Americans will never allow themselves to believe it, but losing in Iraq may well have been the best thing that could have happened to them.

Of course, with three years remaining on the clock, and with an administration which has already well proven its bona fides where a willingness to do anything to seize and maintain power is concerned, we are far from saved. But that said, like Berlin in 1945, the circle is
rapidly closing around the White House and the movement of regressive politics it has led, to the point where even the old rally-‘round-the-flag standbys seem unlikely to work anymore. Sure they’re thinking of bombing Iran in October – of course they are! – but it’s an open question as to whether that would scare away even more votes for America’s Tories in the midterms than it would gain. Soccer moms, used to shuddering in doubt at the capacity of Kerry and clones to provide security for their children, might just as likely
react to bombs over Tehran by instead shuddering in fear at what a three-war president would mean for their children’s future. Just who is America’s real security threat – Iraq, Iran or George W. Bush – might be a question which crossed many voters’ minds for the
first time. Even perennially inept Democrats could actually win an election that lopsided.

The measures of Bush’s demise are now manifest and multiple. The special prosecutor has all but accused him of using secret intelligence to attack political enemies, and what he used was cherry-picked and ultimately based on a known lie anyhow. It is now clear that the guy who said, ‘nobody wants to get to the bottom of this leak case more than I do’, was the very guy who was doing the leaking, and the political fall-out from that alone will be severe. The Libby accusation may the most severe blow of all to an administration which has already taken on Katrina-level quantities of water and is badly listing. Bush is nothing without plain-spoken credibility and national security credentials. Nothing. Nobody thinks the guy is smart. No one sees him as competent. Not many are nutty enough to still buy his radical policies. And that whole regular-guy schtick has come to wear pretty thin. Most Americans now ache palpably for somebody just a little less regular than the guy serving them coffee at the local diner to be in charge of running the Free
World. Bush fooled enough gullible voters (and fabricated the rest) to push his sorry carcass over the finish line in 2004 on the strength of the trust factor and security fears alone. Take those away and the bonhomie turns to tedium, the tedium to contempt, the contempt to fury.

But L’Affaire Libby is only the most flourescent sign of Bush’s demise. His poll numbers just keep going further and further south. Former military brass are starting to come out and savagely trash the administration’s security policy with the fury of wet cats. DeLay is dead. Abramoff is cutting deals on the savage-looking near horizon. Our ambassador to Iraq warns that we are near to plunging the entire Middle East into flames (No! You’re kidding!). Aznar is history. Berlusconi is finished. Blair dangles, hated, by a thread.
Hardly a Latin American country has yet to turn its back on Washington, and those, like Mexico, still on that short list are merely awaiting the elections necessary to ratify the deed. Republicans running for Congress are avoiding Bush like the bubonic plague. In
the California district formerly represented by (soon to be dethroned) Republican king felon Randy Cunningham, there are 14 elephants running for the now open seat, and all but one of them have distanced themselves from Bush. Could you imagine even one
doing so in 2002? The list goes on and on. You might be thinking this could only get better if a couple of administration figures were also recently arrested for commercial fraud and soliciting sex with a minor over the Internet. Guess what?

But – speaking of distancing – I think the most telling bit of news yet came from this ABC headline: “Lawyer: Bush Left Leak Details to Cheney”. It would appear from the story that Bush is so badly rattled that he is now even distancing himself from Cheney. That is very, very, rattled. Apart from the very real possibility that Bush could be left for some short period of time trying to run a government with neither Cheney, Rumsfeld, Card nor Rove
at his side, there’s also the question of whether it’s terribly much in his interest to piss-off ol’ Shotgun Dick. Somehow, I don’t see Cheney doing a Gordon Liddy, rotting away in Leavenworth, waiting for his alleged heart to crap out, and silently taking the fall for the
hamster-in-chief (“I made you! You were nothing! I made you!”). I sure wouldn’t want Darth Cheney on my case, and he doesn’t even know all my dark little secrets about bogus war rationales and the outing of American spies (unless, of course, the NSA told him). For
Bush to be distancing himself from the Man from Hench can only be a sign of the most amazing desperation. The visage of the formerly imperious Bush and Cheney at each others’ throats reminds me of nothing so much as the evocative lyrics from Mark Knopfler’s
aptly named “Done With Bonaparte”, poignantly depicting the once-unstoppable Napoleon’s now-pathetic retreat from Moscow:

And our Grande Armée is dressed in rags
A frozen starving beggar band
Like rats we steal each other's scraps
Fall to fighting hand to hand

Bush is in the toilet, and yet he is nowhere near his nadir yet. For a man with as many personal demons as he has, it’s quite something to contemplate his having the darkest days of his life as yet (but not too yet) to come. We can only hope that he takes us no
further along on that tragic ride than the sad distance we’ve already come. On that will depend the courage of the public, the media and the leadership of the Democratic Party. Scary, eh?

Still, we come a long way from those darkest days when Little Bush and his imperial wizards sought to control more than just foreign continents. Churchill once said “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind”, and now I think I see what he meant.

If we survive this, we will have saved more than Asian peasants or Latin American campesinos from the American imperial machine. Indeed, we will have saved – or had it saved for us – more than even American democracy.

Ultimately, what we poor slobs in the reality-based community will have saved is the empires of our minds, the capacity to think and perceive the truth. What we will have saved is reality itself.


8. Good Evening, Vietnam -- by Tom Engelhardt/ The Nation

Although Vietnam flooded instantly back into American consciousness as the invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003--along with its ancient vocabulary from "hearts and minds" to "quagmire" (or the deeply referential "Q-word")--for the Bush administration the rhetorical reference point was World War II and its aftermath. From Churchillian phraseology to that famed "axis of evil" , modeled on the Axis powers of that global war, to endless invocations of the successful occupations of Germany and Japan, World War II was its analogous war of choice.

Yet from the beginning, no American critic had the Vietnam War era more firmly lodged in the brain than the top officials of the Bush administration. It was as if their invasion was always aimed, as in a suicide mission, directly at America's well-guarded Green Zone of Vietnam memories. After all, much war planning was based on what they considered the "lessons" of defeat in Vietnam.

From the dead-of-night way they brought the dead and wounded back from Iraq to the Pentagon's decision to embed the dreaded media, long blamed for defeat in Vietnam, in military units, Iraq was to be the anti-Vietnam battlefield. If we had, as the right believed, never lost an actual battle in Vietnam, but lost every one on the home front, then the major campaigns of the Iraq War would first be launched and managed on that home front (and only secondarily in Iraq).

But even as the White House and Pentagon were attempting to erase all Vietnam-like thoughts from the reality they hoped to mold both in the Middle East and in the US, even as they were avoiding the "Q-word" or the infamous phrase "light at the end of the tunnel" (for which, in the years to come, they would substitute an endless string of Iraqi "milestones," "landmarks," "tipping points," and "corners" turned), they were themselves hopelessly haunted by Vietnam.

That events in Iraq bore remarkably little relation to those in Vietnam over three decades earlier--beyond the obvious unlearned lesson that smaller powers in our time will not let bigger ones occupy them--seemed to make no difference. Forget the fact that there was no other superpower backing the Iraqi resistance or that the insurgency was a minority Sunni one in a majority Shiite country; forget that Vietnam had next to nothing of resource value other than rice to offer, while Iraq lies at the heart of the oil heartlands of the planet. Just focus for a moment on the recent thoroughly depressing jigsaw puzzle of a map of Baghdad produced by the US military "to reflect… ethno-sectarian fault lines" and leaked to the Times of London . Its various complex patterns of Sunni and Shiite stripes and solids, of flashpoints and "Christian communities," representing the complex swirl of civil war, insurgency, and ethnic cleansing bear no relation to anything imaginable in the Vietnam era.

Vietnam was, after all, a nation that only wanted to exist and whose "insurgency" was led by a single revolutionary/nationalist party headquartered in a separate half-nation. Iraq--an insurgency inside a foreign occupation inside a civil war, all infiltrated by untold levels of corruption, criminality, and religious strife and further confused by a minority Kurdish drive for an independent state--seems to be a nation in desperate search of failed statehood (and the US in Iraq, as Nir Rosen has pointed out, is now but a larger version of all the militias fighting for turf). We are, in short, in new territory here.

And yet somehow, Vietnam only seems to draw closer to Washington's Iraq. Just before the US midterm elections we reached what even the President agreed was a "Tet moment" (though the chaos of those weeks in Iraq bore next to no relation to the South Vietnam-wide offensive launched on the Tet holiday in 1968). It seems that, like drunks at an open bar, the President and others in this administration--no, in the capital more generally--just can't help themselves when it comes to Vietnam.

Take one small example. Just before those midterm elections, George Bush admitted to a group of conservative journalists, as Byron York of the National Review reported, that he was frustrated by the pre-invasion decision not to do the sorts of "body counts" that in Vietnam, as the carnage continued without victory ever heaving into sight, came to seem ludicrous, horrific, and self-defeating. ("'We don't get to say,' said Bush, in what was evidently an outburst of irritation, ‘that--a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it.'")

The problem, the President admitted, was that, in administration war planning, "We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team." Without any other way to measure "success" in devolving Iraq, the President only wished he could reveal the count of kills the Pentagon had long been amassing behind the scenes. Now, as things go from bad to worse he has finally given in to that primal body-count urge. Last week at the Pentagon, for the first time in over three years of post-Mission Accomplished disaster, he offered up a body count, saying :

"Our commanders report that the enemy has also suffered. Offensive operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy."

This wasn't just a presidential slip. Take two typical recent headlines--an AP report went: "2,000 killed in Afghanistan since Sept." ("Almost 2,100 militants have been killed in Afghanistan since Sept. 1 in operations involving coalition special forces soldiers, a U.S. Army spokesman said.") and a Pentagon news release for Iraq, "20 Terrorists Killed, Weapons Caches Destroyed" -- reveal that it is increasingly policy. It seems that we now have an official body-count team in Washington for both our failed wars.

And that's the least of the matter. As 2006 ends, Iraq has become Washington's Vietnam in every sense of the word. On the one hand, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report , representing the world of the elder George Bush, has opted for a policy which combines the Vietnamization program ("Iraqification") of the Nixon years (reduce American ground troops, bulk up American advisors to local forces, increase American air power , and at the very least create a "decent interval" between the withdrawal of American combat forces and the moment when defeat becomes evident). In the meantime, the President's upcoming revamped approach looks to be a combination of a John F. Kennedy-era massive advisor build-up and a classic Lyndon-Johnson years "surge" of troops. In the Vietnam era, another word was used for "surge"-- "escalation." And, as it happens, the newly proposed surge into Baghdad and al-Anbar Province of perhaps 20,000 extra American soldiers (along with a tripling of American advisors/trainers) is exactly the kind of "incremental" escalation that American military men, looking back on the Vietnam disaster, swore would never happen again

Just to ensure that this is indeed Vietnam we're now enmeshed in, both sides in the present recommendation debate have been consulting a key architect of the final losing years of the Vietnam era -- Henry Kissinger .

The dangers of succumbing to the Vietnam urge are remarkably quick to show themselves. Already last week Helen Thomas exposed an instant "credibility gap," sending White House spokesman Tony Snow scrambling to explain how the President could cite a two-month body-count figure but the administration couldn't offer a Pentagon count for four years of war. Meanwhile, the latest polls show a yawning, Vietnam-style "credibility gap" between what anyone in Washington wants to do and the urge of increasingly large majorities of Americans to withdraw all American troops on a fixed timeline from Iraq.

Even more to the Vietnam point is the evidence of collective establishment cowardice in present Iraq planning -- the willingness simply to put off the loss of a war (and of a dream of global domination) into someone else's future. In the Vietnam years, President Nixon (advised by Kissinger) could undoubtedly have gotten us out of Vietnam, but squandered his "capital" instead on his historic China opening, trying in the process -- shades of Iran today -- to get a neighboring regional power to do for his war what he was incapable of doing for himself.

This kind of ongoing madness -- part of which, these days, passes for "realism" just as Kissinger's particular brand of Vietnam-era madness passed for "realpolitik" -- should be material for The Daily Show or The Colbert Report . Unfortunately, it will also be the basis for the deaths of tens or even hundreds of thousands more Iraqis as well as hundreds or thousands more Americans in the years to come. And undoubtedly, when we're done, the Iraqis will be forgotten and -- as in the Vietnam era -- this will be called an "American tragedy," to be followed by an "Iraq Syndrome," and so on into the Möbius strip of history, farce, and catastrophe.


9. Do America and Israel Want the Middle East Engulfed By Civil War?
End of the Strongmen
By JONATHAN COOK/Counterpunch

Nazareth -- The era of the Middle East strongman, propped up by and enforcing Western policy, appears well and truly over. His power is being replaced with rule by civil war, apparently now the American Administration's favoured model across the region.

Fratricidal fighting is threatening to engulf, or already engulfing, the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq. Both Syria and Iran could soon be next, torn apart by attacks Israel is reportedly planning on behalf of the US. The reverberations would likely consume the region.

Western politicians like to portray civil war as a consequence of the West's failure to intervene more effectively in the Middle East. Were we more engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or more aggressive in opposing Syrian manipulations in Lebanon, or more hands-on in Iraq, the sectarian fighting could be prevented. The implication being, of course, that, without the West's benevolent guidance, Arab societies are incapable of dragging themselves out of their primal state of barbarity.

But in fact, each of these breakdowns of social order appears to have been engineered either by the United States or by Israel. In Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, sectarian difference is less important than a clash of political ideologies and interests as rival factions disagree about whether to submit to, or resist, American and Israeli interference. Where the factions derive their funding and legitimacy from -- increasingly a choice between the US or Iran -- seems to determine where they stand in this confrontation.

Palestine is in ferment because ordinary Palestinians are torn between their democratic wish to see Israeli occupation resisted -- in free elections they showed they believed Hamas the party best placed to realise that goal -- and the basic need to put food on the table for their families. The combined Israeli and international economic siege of the Hamas government, and the Palestinian population, has made a bitter internal struggle for control of resources inevitable.

Lebanon is falling apart because the Lebanese are divided: some believe that the country's future lies with attracting Western capital and welcoming Washington's embrace, while others regard America's interest as cover for Israel realising its long-standing design to turn Lebanon into a vassal state, with or without a military occupation. Which side the Lebanese choose in the current stand-off reflects their judgment of how plausible are claims of Western and Israeli benevolence.

And the slaughter in Iraq is not simply the result of lawlessness -- as is commonly portrayed -- but also about rival groups, the nebulous "insurgents", employing various brutal and conflicting strategies: trying to oust the Anglo-American occupiers and punish local Iraqis suspected of collaborating with them; extracting benefits from the puppet Iraqi regime; and jockeying for positions of influence before the inevitable grand American exit.

All of these outcomes in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq could have been foreseen -- and almost certainly were. More than that, it looks increasingly like the growing tensions and carnage were planned. Rather than an absence of Western intervention being the problem, the violence and fragmentation of these societies seems to be precisely the goal of the intervention.

Evidence has emerged in Britain that suggests such was the case in Iraq. Testimony given by a senior British official to the 2004 Butler inquiry investigating intelligence blunders in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was belatedly published last week, after attempts by the Foreign Office to hush it up.

Carne Ross, a diplomat who helped to negotiate several UN security council resolutions on Iraq, told the inquiry that British and US officials knew very well that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs and that bringing him down would lead to chaos.

"I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said, adding: "At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

The obvious question, then, is why would the US want and intend civil war raging across the Middle East, apparently threatening strategic interests like oil supplies and the security of a key regional ally, Israel?

Until the presidency of Bush Jnr, the American doctrine in the Middle East had been to install or support strongmen, containing them or replacing them when they fell out of favour. So why the dramatic and, at least ostensibly, incomprehensible shift in policy?

Why allow Yasser Arafat's isolation and humiliation in the occupied territories, followed by Mahmoud Abbas's, when both could have easily been cultivated as strongmen had they been given the tools they were implicitly promised by the Oslo process: a state, the pomp of office and the coercive means to impose their will on rival groups like Hamas? With almost nothing to show for years of concessions to Israel, both looked to the Palestinian public more like lapdogs rather than rottweilers.

Why make a sudden and unnecessary fuss about Syria's interference in Lebanon, an interference that the West originally encouraged as a way to keep the lid on sectarian violence? Why oust Damascus from the scene and then promote a "Cedar Revolution" that pandered to the interests of only one section of Lebanese society and continued to ignore the concerns of the largest and most dissatisfied community, the Shia? What possible outcome could there be but simmering resentment and the threat of violence?

And why invade Iraq on the hollow pretext of locating WMDs and then dislodge its dictator, Saddam Hussein, who for decades had been armed and supported by the US and had very effectively, if ruthlessly, held Iraq together? Again from Carne's testimony, it is clear that no one in the intelligence community believed Saddam really posed a threat to the West. Even if he needed "containing" or possibly replacing, as Bush's predecessors appeared to believe, why did the president decide simply to overthrow him, leaving a power void at Iraq's heart?

The answer appears to be related to the rise of the neocons, who finally grasped power with the election of President Bush. Israel's most popular news website, Ynet, recently observed of the neocons: "Many are Jews who share a love for Israel."

The neocons' vision of American global supremacy is intimately tied to, and dependent on, Israel's regional supremacy. It is not so much that the neocons choose to promote Israel's interests above those of America as that they see the two nations' interests as inseparable and identical.

Although usually identified with the Israeli right, the neocons' political alliance with the Likud mainly reflects their support for adopting belligerent means to achieve their policy goals rather than the goals themselves.

The consistent aim of Israeli policy over decades, from the left and right, has been to acquire more territory at the expense of its neighbours and entrench its regional supremacy through "divide and rule", particularly of its weakest neighbours such as the Palestinians and the Lebanese. It has always abominated Arab nationalism, especially of the Baathist variety in Iraq and Syria, because it appeared immune to Israeli intrigues.

For many years Israel favoured the same traditional colonial approach the West used in the Middle East, where Britain, France and later the US supported autocratic leaders, usually from minority populations, to rule over the majority in the new states they had created, whether Christians in Lebanon, Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq, or Hashemites in Jordan. The majority was thereby weakened, and the minority forced to become dependent on colonial favours to maintain its privileged position.

Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, for example, was similarly designed to anoint a Christian strongman and US stooge, Bashir Gemayel, as a compliant president who would agree to an anti-Syrian alliance with Israel.

But decades of controlling and oppressing Palestinian society allowed Israel to develop a different approach to divide and rule: what might be termed organised chaos, or the "discord" model, one that came to dominate first its thinking and later that of the neocons.

During its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel preferred discord to a strongman, aware that a pre-requisite of the latter would be the creation of a Palestinian state and its furnishing with a well-armed security force. Neither option was ever seriously contemplated.

Only briefly under international pressure was Israel forced to relent and partially adopt the strongman model by allowing the return of Yasser Arafat from exile. But Israel's reticence in giving Arafat the means to assert his rule and suppress his rivals, such as Hamas, led inevitably to conflict between the Palestinian president and Israel that ended in the second intifada and the readoption of the discord model.

This latter approach exploits the fault lines in Palestinian society to exacerbate tensions and violence. Initially Israel achieved this by promoting rivalry between regional and clan leaders who were forced to compete for Israel's patronage. Later Israel encouraged the emergence of Islamic extremism, especially in the form of Hamas, as a counterweight to the growing popularity of the secular nationalism of Arafat's Fatah party.

Israel's discord model is now reaching its apotheosis: low-level and permanent civil war between the old guard of Fatah and the upstarts of Hamas. This kind of Palestinian in-fighting usefully depletes the society's energies and its ability to organise against the real enemy: Israel and its enduring occupation.

The neocons, it appears, have been impressed with this model and wanted to export it to other Middle Eastern states. Under Bush they sold it to the White House as the solution to the problems of Iraq and Lebanon, and ultimately of Iran and Syria too.

The provoking of civil war certainly seemed to be the goal of Israel's assault on Lebanon over the summer. The attack failed, as even Israelis admit, because Lebanese society rallied behind Hizbullah's impressive show of resistance rather than, as was hoped, turning on the Shia militia.

Last week the Israeli website Ynet interviewed Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli citizen and co-founder of MEMRI, a service translating Arab leaders' speeches that is widely suspected of having ties with Israel's security services. She is also the wife of David Wurmser, a senior neocon adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Meyrav Wurmser revealed that the American Administration had publicly dragged its feet during Israel's assault on Lebanon because it was waiting for Israel to expand its attack to Syria.

"The anger [in the White House] is over the fact that Israel did not fight against the Syrians The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its [Iran's] strategic and important ally [Syria] should be hit."

Wurmser continued: "It is difficult for Iran to export its Shiite revolution without joining Syria, which is the last nationalistic Arab country. If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and [changed] the strategic map in the Middle East."

Neocons talk a great deal about changing maps in the Middle East. Like Israel's dismemberment of the occupied territories into ever-smaller ghettos, Iraq is being severed into feuding mini-states. Civil war, it is hoped, will redirect Iraqis' energies away from resistance to the US occupation and into more negative outcomes.

Similar fates appear to be awaiting Iran and Syria, at least if the neocons, despite their waning influence, manage to realise their vision in Bush's last two years.

The reason is that a chaotic and feuding Middle East, although it would be a disaster in the view of most informed observers, appears to be greatly desired by Israel and its neocon allies. They believe that the whole Middle East can be run successfully the way Israel has run its Palestinian populations inside the occupied territories, where religious and secular divisions have been accentuated, and inside Israel itself, where for many decades Arab citizens were "de-Palestinianised" and turned into identity-starved and quiescent Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bedouin.

That conclusion may look foolhardy, but then again so does the White House's view that it is engaged in a "clash of civilisations" which it can win with a "war on terror".

All states are capable of acting in an irrational or self-destructive manner, but Israel and its supporters may be more vulnerable to this failing than most. That is because Israelis' perception of their region and their future has been grossly distorted by the official state ideology, Zionism, with its belief in Israel's inalienable right to preserve itself as an ethnic state; its confused messianic assumptions, strange for a secular ideology, about Jews returning to a land promised by God; and its contempt for, and refusal to understand, everything Arab or Muslim.

If we expect rational behaviour from Israel or its neocon allies, more fool us.

(Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming " Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State " published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net)


10. U.S. Can No Longer Shroud the Iraq Civil War -- by Amy Goodman/ Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Every great work of art goes through messy phases while it is in transition. A lump of clay can become a sculpture; blobs of paint become paintings which inspire."

No, this is not Pablo Picasso speaking, but Maj. Gen. William Caldwell IV, spokesman for the Multi-National Force -- Iraq, comparing the carnage in Iraq with a work of art in another audacious attempt to "paint" Iraq as anything other than a catastrophe.

The general's remarks do bring the great artist to mind. Picasso's epic painting "Guernica," named after the city in Spain, captured the brutality of the bombing of that city during another civil war, the Spanish Civil War. The painting, almost 30 feet wide, is a globally recognized depiction and artistic condemnation of war. Picasso shows the terror on the faces of people, the frightened animals. He shows the dead, the dying, the dismembered.

A tapestry reproduction of it adorns the lobby outside of the United Nations Security Council. In February 2003, before then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his major push at the U.N. for war -- a speech he would later call a "blot" on his record -- a blue curtain was drawn across the tapestry so that the image would not be the backdrop for press statements on the coming war. Immediately, posters and banners of Picasso's "Guernica" began appearing at the anti-war demonstrations sweeping the globe.

The attempted control of imagery and propaganda, language and spin, have been a high priority of the Bush administration. Yes, the Pentagon forbade photographing the flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers. But the manipulation goes beyond the war abroad.

President Eisenhower once said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed." If Eisenhower worked for the government today, he would have to revise his statement. Just last week, the Bush administration stopped using the words "hunger" or "hungry" when describing the millions of Americans who can't afford to eat. Instead of suffering from hunger, the Agriculture Department now says these people are experiencing "very low food security."

While the Bush administration has had some success in covering up the truth, it seems like reality is finally beginning to outpace its efforts.

Take for example Hurricane Katrina. A side effect of the Bush administration not responding to that disaster in a timely fashion is that when the network reporters went to New Orleans, there were no troops to embed with. What we saw for one of the first times was the network correspondents reporting from the victims' perspective. Day after day, unspun, unfiltered. Bodies floated across our TV screens.

I remember a young female reporter interviewing a man whose wife's hand had just slipped out of his, as she told him to take care of their children. After telling his story, the man waded into the water in shock with his boy. The reporter started to cry. The reports galvanized the country.

Could you imagine if for one week we saw those images in Iraq: babies dead on the ground, women with their legs blown off by cluster bombs, soldiers dead and dying. Americans are a compassionate people. They would say no -- war is not an answer to conflict in the 21st century.

The debate now in vogue is whether Iraq is in a civil war. Sectarian violence on a mass scale is acknowledged all around -- gone are the harangues that the media are not covering the "positive stories" or the "good news" -- there simply is no good news in Iraq.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has now lasted longer than the U.S. involvement in World War II. Iraqis suffered the most violent day in the entire war while Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving.

The Iraqi Ministry of Health estimated that 150,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion. In an October 2006 article in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health estimated the total number of Iraqi civilians who have died from violent causes since the outset of Operation Iraqi Freedom as somewhere near 655,000.

Iraq, like Spain in the 1930s, is definitely in a civil war. A civil war started by the U.S. invasion and fueled by the U.S. occupation. The shroud over the U.N.'s "Guernica" tapestry is gone. Now the only shrouds worth noting are those that wrap the victims of the daily slaughter in Iraq.

(Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!" a daily international TV/radio news hour. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.)