It's also possible that we no longer have much influence over the course of events, that events have taken on such momentum that no one can significantly control the outcome. If that's the case, what should WE do?

Brian, no fingerpointing or blameplacing, please. THIS forum is about solutions, not foodfighting over whose fault the situation is.

Did you have something to offer as far as how to handle it NOW, specific steps to take or policies to adopt?

The US should be prepared for a similar outbreak in Iraq, with the Shi'ite movements attempting to take the initiative.

The battle lines of a full-scale civil war in Iraq have been drawn in Baghdad.

Highway 60 has become one of the bloodiest fronts in the war between Sunni and Shia. Known to its frightened inhabitants as the "street of death", the road in the south-east of the capital is a symbol of the sectarian violence that is pushing the country ever closer to the abyss.

A nondescript suburban street containing half a dozen schools, the local hospital and a children's nursery, it has become the dividing line between the Sunnis and Shia, who once lived side by side yet now face each other across a mile-long strip of no man's land.

Members of the once mixed community have been forced to move their homes to what are, in effect, two sectarian enclaves.

In an escalation of the violence which is claiming hundreds of lives in Baghdad each week, the skies above Highway 60 resound, day and night, to the blast of home-made mortars as militiamen shell each other's communities - safe in the knowledge that they will not be harming their own.

Sitting outside the Al Hussein mosque in the centre of Abu Disheer, now an exclusively Shia district, Abu Raad boasts proudly of his precision with a home-made mortar.

"We have watched for three years while the Sunni killed our brothers and now it is time for revenge," said the 26-year-old fighter, a former soldier in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard. "All those people in Dora are terrorists. I shot two missiles at them and I feel proud."

The total separation of the two communities was completed last week with the murder of a Shia family in the Sunni stronghold of Dora City, on the northern side of Highway 60.

The incident prompted the last remaining Shia to flee the enclave with their possessions and lit the fuse for an explosion of violence between the two communities.

The execution of the Shia family in their home by militiamen, after they were warned in an anonymous note to leave, prompted a spate of mortar attacks into Dora City from a park in Abu Disheer. Abu Mahmood, the 44-year-old neighbour of the murdered family, said: "It makes me sad because not so long ago we all lived together. Now all the Shia have left."...

Many of the recruits to Iraq's fledging armed forces are drawn from al-Sadr's militias.

As Iraqi security forces and the US military are accused of turning a blind eye to the slaughter, observers fear that the country has reached a third, even more intractable, phase in the recent conflict, beyond insurgency and beyond even combat between organised armed groups.

"What we're now seeing has no shape whatever," a Western diplomat said. "It's just everyone fighting everyone. Anarchy."

Hard to know how to prepare other than build more bunkers.



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml.../16/ixnews.html

AMERICAN generals have laid bare the facts: Baghdad is descending into chaos, and the spectre of all-out civil war now looms.

Instead of standing down, as had been hoped, this year, the US military is preparing for a major operation to try to take back Baghdad’s streets from Shia and Sunni extremists. The goal is to stem sectarian violence that Iraqi security forces cannot control.

The stakes could not be higher. The fate of the US mission in Iraq is on the line as fighting in Lebanon to the west, and the rise of a militant Iran to the east threaten American interests throughout the Middle East.

Without a firm grip on Baghdad, the US and its Iraqi allies cannot control the country. But Baghdad’s diverse population of Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Turkomans and Christians makes for a volatile mix as the country’s religious and ethnic groups compete for power in the new Iraq. All the tensions that threaten to tear the country apart play themselves out in Baghdad.

General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, bluntly spelled out the situation before a Senate committee on Thursday.

“I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I have seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war,” he said.

That was hardly news to the 6.5 million residents of Iraq’s shabby, tumultuous capital. Many Iraqis believe their country has been in a low-intensity civil war since February’s bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra. That blast triggered a wave of reprisal attacks against Sunnis, accelerating a pattern of tit-for-tat killings, kidnappings and bombings.

Abizaid’s comments marked a stunning departure from the public position taken by US military officials here for months. A bare two months ago, General George W Casey Jr, the top US general in Iraq, was talking about reducing the US military presence this year as Iraqi units took responsibility for more and more territory.

Two months after the Samarra bombing, Major-General Rick Lynch said US forces had found no “widespread movement” of Shias and Sunnis away from mixed areas – at a time when the Iraqi government estimated 90,000 people had fled their homes.

Abizaid’s comments also represent a stark admission that Iraq’s vaunted national unity government of Shias, Sunnis and Kurds is united in name only. Sunni politicians have yet to bring Sunni insurgents to the bargaining table. Some key Shia politicians maintain close links to militias. Without a political agreement on how to share power and wealth, it is unlikely the Baghdad security operation will be much more than a stopgap measure....

...The top U.S. military officer, General Peter Pace, said now is a decisive time for the Iraqi people to make clear to the militants that they want the violence to end so they can build a democratic future.

"We need the Iraqi people to seize this moment," he said. "We provided security for them. Their armed forces are providing security for them, and their armed forces are dying for them. They need to decide that this is their moment."...

Brian, no fingerpointing or blameplacing, please. THIS forum is about solutions, not foodfighting over whose fault the situation is.

Artie, you keep complaining about Bush bashing, but you're pretty bad about bashing a "lefty" straw man yourself.

Do you have an actual SUGGESTION

If this forum is inactive for 30 days, will it sink to the bottom like the others?

(COMMENT)

We would have to go back to the "Powell Doctrine" of overwhelming force.

We would do better to go back to the Monroe Doctrine.

We would do better to go back to the Monroe Doctrine.

Welcome Sam.

It was a simpler world back then, wasn't it?

I bet people who lived then didn't think so.

President Bush strutted confidently last year in advance of the December Iraqi elections, brashly predicting that U.S. victory is just around the corner. Then, in the spring, after the bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra, the president shifted to a kind of gritted-teeth forced optimism as the shaky government of Prime Minister Maliki took shape amid intensifying sectarian violence. Now, as Iraqi deaths mount at the rate of 3,000 per month, Bush has all but abandoned talk of victory and is reduced to issuing scary pronouncements about what failure in Iraq would mean. But most of what the president warns is wrong.

Bush’s argument that Iraq would fall into the clutches of al-Qaida, in particular, is utterly stupid: first, because al-Qaida is only a tiny part of the Sunni-led Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation; and second, because the Shiites and the Kurds, who make up perhaps three-quarters of Iraq’s population, would never allow what Dick Cheney calls “al-Qaida types” to seize control of Iraq.

The president’s dire warnings on Iraq come far too late to matter. He might, or he might not, be able to scare voters. But he isn’t scaring the establishment.

What’s happening in Washington now is that the establishment political class—and that includes the military, moderate Republican and Democratic members of Congress, the jabbering pundits and op-ed writers, and the bulk of the thinktank denizens—are coming to grips with the stark fact that the war in Iraq is over. And that the United States has lost. It’s beginning to sink in, but it won’t be confronted directly by the political class until after the November elections. After that, all hell is going to break loose. If the Democrats win back Congress, it will happen faster—but even if the Republicans hang on, the gusting winds on Iraq now buffeting the White House will gather strength to become a full-fledged, Category 5 hurricane.

There was an inkling of that impending doom in the 66-page report released by the Defense Department last week, called “Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq.”

"The security situation is at its most complex state since the initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom"—meaning since the invasion of March, 2003—according to the Pentagon report. The United States is facing both the continuing Sunni insurgency, which it described as “potent and viable,” and a proliferation of sectarian militias and ethnic killings. In a stunning indictment of its ability to provide security and economic stability, the Defense Department added: “Local illegal armed groups are seen as the primary providers of security and basic social services.” These groups, it said, have become “entrenched” in both east (Shiite) and west (Sunni) Baghdad. And it concluded: “Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq.”

The notion of entrenched militias dividing Baghdad into east and west, of course, immediately raises the spectre of Beirut during its 1975-1990 civil war, and such fears are increasingly shared by Iraqis, says the Pentagon. It notes that not only in Baghdad but in the mid-Euphrates region south of Baghdad and in the area around Basra, Iraq’s port city in the south, there are sharply rising fears of all-out civil war among Iraqis.

Casualties in Iraq, the Pentagon says dryly, have increased 51 per cent since the last report was issued in May 2006. Attacks against U.S. forces have doubled since 2004, to a staggering 800 attacks per week, causing 17-20 casualties (killed and wounded) among U.S. and other coalition forces per day—that is, 20 Americans, Brits and others killed or wounded every single day.

For all its blunt talk, the Pentagon report still drastically understates the situation on the ground. Anthony Cordesman, a conservative military analyst and Persian Gulf expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, issued a scathing 15-page indictment of the Defense Department’s own bleak report this week, saying that the Pentagon “does not identify the need to shift U.S. strategy to deal with the growing risk of civil conflict.” He adds that by ignoring the vast political problems that plague the government of Prime Minister Maliki, the Pentagon is “lying by omission.” And he calls the section on Iraq’s nonexistent economy, with estimates of unemployment as high as 60 per cent, “over-optimistic rubbish.”

In spite of the massive, ongoing effort to secure Baghdad—the second such big push since last spring—the carnage continues without letup, from massive attacks that kill scores to violent outbursts that leave a dozen here and a dozen there dead to the endless one-by-one killings that leave bodies scattered all over Baghdad every morning. According to the Pentagon’s report, although the violence is centered in Baghdad, it is spreading, with the pace of attacks up significantly in Kirkuk, Mosul and Diyala.

A brief tour of Iraq’s three main communities makes the point even clearer.

The Sunnis, who have been the heart of the resistance to the U.S. occupation since at least the fall of 2003, are virtually unified now. A critical piece of news, overlooked but for a brief mention in the Washington Post, is that fully 300 Iraqi tribal leaders—mostly Sunni, but including some Shiites—met in a town south of Kirkuk, to issue a demand that Saddam Hussein be freed. One of the leaders, whose tribe numbers 1.5 million, said: “If the demand is not satisfied, we will lead a general, sweeping, and popular uprising.” Such a threat would mean, in effect, that the Iraqi insurgency would be adopted officially by the entire tribal leadership of western and central Iraq. This is not al-Qaida. This is Iraq.

The Shiites, meanwhile, are entering the early stages of a fratricidal splintering. Although they have long been divided, current trends would indicate that the Shiite bloc in Iraq is about to collapse. Until now, the Shiites have been the tent pole holding up the entire U.S. enterprise in Iraq—so, if they splinter, it signals the end of the U.S. occupation. It’s a kaleidoscope: The Mahdi Army of Muqtada Sadr is restless, seemingly ready to launch another uprising, as it did in 2004—and Sadr’s army itself is seriously beset by divisions, with armed, rogue elements throughout. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is pressing hard for partition of Iraq—which it calls “federation”—and one of its leaders (who happens to be the Iraqi education minister) laid out a scenario for full-scale civil war. “Federation will cut off all parts of the country that are incubating terrorists,” he said. “We will put soldiers along the frontiers.”

Deepening the divisions among the Shiites even further, a new warlord is emerging, Mahmoud Hassani, who has built private armies in Najaf, Karbala, Basra and Baghdad, and who is violently opposed to SCIRI and to Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Hassani, who also opposes the United States and who hates Iran, is emerging as a nationalist Shiite leader who could upset the whole Shiite apple cart.

And the pesky Kurds are openly threatening secession. Massoud Barzani, who is the real power in Kurdistan, said defiantly this week: “If we want to separate, we will do it without hesitation of fears.” Should the Kurds launch their widely expected operation to seize Kirkuk and Iraq’s northern oil fields, it will trigger a major escalation of civil war in Iraq.

Bush isn’t acknowledging these realities. The Pentagon is only hinting at them—though the generals know what’s going on. But inside the political class, an awareness of realities in Iraq is dawning. Last week, James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton, two consummate political insiders who happen to lead a hush-hush task force on Iraq called the Iraq Study Group, were in Baghdad, where (according to my sources) they got a heavy dose of reality. The Baker task force—which I wrote about in The Washington Monthly—includes top-level luminaries, including Robert M. Gates, Vernon Jordan and William Perry. Returning from Baghdad, Baker’s elite group, which also includes dozens of Iraq experts, met this week to consider a draft plan to exit Iraq, Jack Murtha-style, or alternatively, to stick around for another 12 months and then end up getting out anyway. Increasingly, after the elections, that will be the stark choice forced on the White House—by Washington’s political elite, by the precipitous drop in public support for the war and by the growing antiwar movement that has set up shop at Camp Democracy on the Mall.

Iraq's biggest province has suffered a total breakdown in law and order in which al-Qaida has emerged as the dominant political force, according to descriptions of a classified US military intelligence review reported today.

The report, by the US marine corps colonel Peter Devlin, focuses on the vast, arid region of Anbar in the west, which contains the insurgent-held towns of Fallujah, Ramadi and Haditha.

The Washington Post quoted military officers who had seen the report as saying the area was "beyond repair".

"We haven't been defeated militarily, but we have been defeated politically - and that's where wars are won and lost," was one army officer's summary of the review quoted by the newspaper.

The same officer concluded that there were no functioning Iraqi institutions in the province, and that al-Qaida in Iraq, the insurgent group founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was Anbar's most powerful political force.

The report is believed to be the most negative one sent from the field in Iraq.

Mr Devlin has been stationed in Anbar since February and is regarded as one of the military's most respected and level-headed intelligence officers, adding to concern in Washington about his comments....

You're not winning w/the happy talk war, slug.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1870023,00.html

You're in denial, Mr Fister.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Sunni Arab and al-Qaida insurgency that first shoved Iraq toward chaos three years ago clearly had taken a back seat by Sunday to the sectarian bloodletting that is sending the country spiraling toward - if not deeper into - civil war.

Evidence continued to mount in the 44th month of U.S. involvement that Iraqi centers of power - politicians and the government, the police and military - were unable or unwilling to rein in violence in parts of the country where Sunni and Shiite Muslim or Kurdish populations rub up against one another.

The violence has forced at least 1.5 million Iraqis to flee their homeland, with hundreds of new passports being issued daily to those who can afford a plane ticket or taxi ride out of the country, according to the Migration Ministry. The ministry said 300,000 people had also left their homes for elsewhere in Iraq.

The Shiite Majority in parliament, over complaints of dirty tricks from rival Sunni and even some Shiite legislators, adopted a measure that would allow the effective partition of the country after an 18-month waiting period - something widely opposed in polls of Iraqis.

"The starting point is to recognize that Iraq is not going to be a democratic, unified country that serves as a model for the region. The violence and the Sunni-Shiite division have already ruled that out," Dennis Ross, a Mideast peace negotiator and policy maker for Presidents Clinton and George H.W. Bush, wrote in an Op-ed column for the Washington Post on Sunday.

A partition would leave Iraq with a weak central government and largely independent states run by Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south and Sunnis in the center and west - giving impetus for still more violence and still further population upheaval.

Iraqis so-called national unity government announced that next Saturday's much-anticipated national reconciliation conference was indefinitely postponed for unspecified "emergency reasons." A week before the planned opening of the conference, Iraq's deeply divided politicians had not managed even to agree on a venue for the meeting.

Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in power for just more than four months, took office at the head of what was termed a national unity government. Within days he had presented a 24-point plan for national reconciliation. The inability to meet on that topic speaks to the failure of both his government and opposition politicians.

The postponement was announced on the first anniversary of the successful national referendum which adopted the country's first post-Saddam constitution, which was hailed at the time of a harbinger of a peaceful and democratic Iraq.

By the close of the weekend, at least 86 people were reported dead in a two-day spree of sectarian revenge killings and insurgent bombings - mainly in one city north of Baghdad.

The capital, where random sectarian violence and roving death squads have caused traffic jams to vanish and commerce and society to head toward a standstill, felt like a stick of dynamite with a lighted fuse.

American analysts like Ross and Anthony H. Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies have said this week that 15,000 to 20,000 additional U.S. troops were needed to give the Americans an even shot at leaving behind a peaceful Iraq.

Then, they say, major policy changes are necessary in both Washington and Baghdad.

"Iraq is already in a state of serious civil war. The current efforts at political compromise and improved security at best are buying time. There is a critical risk that Iraq will drift into a major civil conflict over the coming months, see its present government fail, and/or divide and separate in some form," Cordesman wrote in an analysis last week....

If we've decided that 3000 casualties is more than we'll ever be willing to pay for anything but defending the border we might as well sink a lot more into SDI and not bother defending Europe, SK, or Taiwan

AS the death toll among Iraqis caught up in a bloody civil war continues to mount at an alarming but totally predictable rate, US President George Bush and Tony Blair are desperately trying to write an exit strategy 3½ years too late.

The President, who is facing a hostile Congress following November's mid-term election, is under urgent pressure to sort out the mess in Iraq following a scathing bi-partisan commission report that says his war policies have failed and “time is running out”.

The Iraq Study Group's report said the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating” after nearly four years of bloodshed and more than 2,900 American deaths. Even a White House acknowledges all is not well. “It's clear that the present situation is not one that could be sustained or accepted,” said White

The Study Group's recommendations ranged from gradually withdrawing US combat forces during the next year to increasing the training of Iraqi security forces to enlisting diplomatic help from Iraq's neighbours - not only to resolve problems in Iraq but to find an end to the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

“The American people have spoken,” says incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group has spoken. They have all demanded a change of course in Iraq, and the Bush administration must listen.”

Mr Blair, whose date with the Metropolitan Police over the cash-for-ermine inquiries cannot be put off much longer, arrived in Washington this week with the stinging rebuke of Britain's former top soldier hitting the headlines.

General Sir Mike Jackson, who retired as head of the Army in August, used the BBC's annual Dimbleby Lecture to lash out at the underfunding of the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is a mismatch between what we do and the resources we are given with which to do it.”...

Rumsfeld's Iraq memo offered too little, too late

Thanks to an administration leak, we now know that on the day before the 2006 midterm elections, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote a classified memo to President Bush admitting that the war in Iraq is going badly.


Rumsfeld tells the president that "clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough" and that now "it is time for a major adjustment." He provides a list of options including troop withdrawals. We could "begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and coalition forces," he tells Bush, and "conduct an accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases" in Iraq.

Some of Rumsfeld's options sound remarkably similar to proposals made by Bush's critics over the past several months -- suggestions that were quickly denounced by the White House. As Iraq spiraled out of control, Bush argued simplistically that America had only two options: either "stay the course" or "cut and run." The former became Bush's mantra during the election campaign.

But in the secret memo, Rumsfeld lists "continue on the current path" as the first of several "less attractive options." Rumsfeld was telling Bush behind closed doors that "stay the course" was no longer viable, even as he and his boss were saying the opposite to the American people.

Many of the pundits and politicians who advocated war from the beginning are now saying that while the war was a good idea, it has been a failure in its execution and they rightly blame the Bush administration's incompetence. But there were others who argued against the war long before it was launched on March 19, 2003. And not all of these people were the "usual suspects" of the anti-war left.

On Aug. 15, 2002, Brent Scowcroft, the respected National Security adviser under President George H. W. Bush, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled "Don't attack Saddam." He argued that an Iraq war would take us off course. "Saddam's goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them."

Scowcroft predicted that a war in Iraq "is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism."...

Yes, my first thought on reading Rummy's departure memo was "So why the fark didn't you do this stuff while you were SecDef?"