It's November 2006 in Iraq

Ralph Peters throws in the towel with perfect circular logic:

WE went to Iraq to overthrow a police state. Through a combination of stubbornness, naivete and noble intentions, we've replaced it with another police state - more violent, more corrupt and less accountable.

As an Army officer remarked to me, Saddam's starting to look good.

The Air Force needs some more money -- $50 billion of it. And why?

Another source familiar with the Air Force plans said the extra funds would help pay to transport growing numbers of U.S. soldiers being killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then, of course, The Chart:

http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/01military_lg.jpg

Context here. Loyola has only this to say: "It shouldn't have run because it was classified!" The contents, apparently, are of no account.

But even Loyola isn't as gone as Michael Novak. As Belgravia indirectly responds

Heckuva job, Rummy! Will he stay on until we're more firmly in the "chaos" zone, or do us all a mega-favor and finally step aside after Nov 7 so as to allow new civilian leadership a shot at remedial strategic oversight of this bungled war? We know what Cheney thinks, of course, which is that things are going "remarkably well" in Iraq. So why shake up a good thing with a new Secretary of Defense not wedded to a failed strategy then? Everything is A-OK.

Four were teenagers. Thirty were 21 or younger. The oldest was 53. They left homes in big cities and small prairie towns and Southern hamlets to answer the call of duty in Iraq, where 103 soldiers, Marines, airmen and seamen died in October — the war's fourth-deadliest month and the worst since January 2005.

...

In Rancho Cucamonga, the death of Army Capt. Mark C. Paine left his mother deeply conflicted. Paine, 32, died when a roadside bomb was detonated next to his Humvee on Oct. 15 near Taji, north of Baghdad.

"Am I proud?" Kairyn Paine, 56, asked with a weary sigh. "Yes, of course, but what does this say about our strategy over there?"

Once a staunch supporter of President Bush, Paine said she had undergone "a complete change of heart as I've watched the failed strategy unfold."

Mark Paine was troubled by the way the war has divided the country, she said, but he never questioned his commander-in-chief's strategy.

Roger Paine, 63, called his son a warrior who "died doing exactly what he wanted to do."

Paine left a hospital — where he had been recuperating from a concussion caused by a roadside bomb — to join his unit when he heard the soldiers were engaged in intense fighting, his mother said. He was one of 10 officers and one of 10 Californians to die in October.

Insult to injury:

Nearly one-third of the 104 U.S. troops killed in Iraq in October were on multiple tours, a Chicago Tribune analysis published Wednesday said.

And on. And on. And on.

I haven't laughed so hard since Ali G interviewed Pat Buchanan.

I love the logic - it's like praising a drug czar for crippling the cocaine trade by unleashing a smallpox epidemic that kills a quarter of the population of Colombia.

We both want there to be benchmarks — Iraqi developed and designed benchmarks — that show the Iraqi people and the American people that this young democracy is making progress.

Ah, the inspiration.

Elsewhere in the NYT, conclusions that were already patently obvious.

Fuck our leaders. Seriously.

My disillusionment with our Iraq endeavor began last summer, when I was invited to a high-level discussion with administration officials. I went into the meeting with one firm goal, to convince my hosts that they'd better have Plan B in case Iraq continued to disintegrate. I left the session convinced that the administration still didn't have Plan A, only a blur of meandering policies and blind hopes. After more than three years, it was still "An Evening at the Improv."

Then, last month, as Iraq's prime minister seconded al-Sadr's demand that our troops free a death-squad mastermind they had captured, I knew a fateful page had turned. A week later, al-Maliki forbade additional U.S. military raids in Sadr City, the radical mullah's Baghdad stronghold. On Tuesday, al-Maliki insisted that our troops remove roadblocks set up to help find a kidnapped U.S. soldier. Iraq's prime minister has made his choice. We're not it. It's time to face reality. Only Iraqis can save Iraq now — and they appear intent on destroying it. Aprs nous, le deluge.

Iraq could have turned out differently. It didn't. And we must be honest about it. We owe that much to our troops. They don't face the mere forfeiture of a few congressional seats but the loss of their lives. Our military is now being employed for political purposes. It's unworthy of our nation.

Right. Sure.

Anyhoo, Goofus agrees with Boehner, says "Both those men are doing fantastic jobs and I strongly support them."

Oh yeah, and went out of his way to mention that Cheney's staying for the next two years, even tho no one asked or ever mentioned anything about him leaving.

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

...

The termination language was inserted into the bill by Congressional staff members working for Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and who declared on Monday that he plans to run for president in 2008.

---

I just got a copy of excerpts from an article that will appear in the January issue of Vanity Fair. The article is not scheduled to hit newsstands until December 6, but for some reason — does anyone have any guesses? — Vanity Fair has rushed excerpts out now. In the article, a number of the main advocates of war in Iraq turn on President Bush and accuse him and his administration of bungling the plan for the war. Some quotes from the article:

Richard Perle: "I think that if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'…Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

Kenneth Adelman (who predicted that victory in Iraq would be a "cakewalk"): I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

Kenneth Adelman: "The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.… I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."

Amusing, Perle's reaction there.

The intellectual architects and rhetoricians behind the Bush Doctrine, the War on Terror, and the Iraq invasion have essentially given up. And they blame the performance of Bush and Rumsfeld for the failures of the policy. I would argue that the concept was deeply flawed, not just the execution. I can't help but notice the refusal of these men to take responsibility for the failures in Iraq. It's always somebody else's fault. I'm certain we'll have the great argument over whether or not the policy was attainable at all in the next few years. But for now, the exodus of the war's theoraticians and planners stands in as the greatest argument for the Administration's failure on national security.

http://www.rainbowbookstore.org/images/cms/7719_bookpage.jpg

I actually wrote to David Rose, the author of the article-to-come, a person for whom I have considerable respect. He confirmed that words attributed to me in the promo had been taken out of context.

Said words were:

"Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."

Uh, well done?

Frum is even more annoyed and vents a lot of spleen about how his meaning was distorted, but it reads like a lot of split hairs to me. That he's grown disenchanted with the White House was clear enough over the years; that he wants to still cling on to his hopes equally understandable. But what did he expect when a wider audience read that, exactly -- and if he's not saying anything new, why get surprised that it's being broadcast now? Complaining that there's partisan intent in this collection of quotes is like complaining that the sky is blue, and for a former White House speechwriter to complain about it is even sadder/funnier.

Ledeen and Frum, meanwhile, both say that author Rose is a-okay by them and it's those nasty editors at VF who get the blame. Are these people really that naive to act so surprised?

But HERE'S the big news of the day, and it's actually old -- Desert Crossing, the 1999 wargame scenario for an Iraq invasion, now available thanks to the FOI Act (I'm still surprised THAT hasn't been attempted to be revoked yet, honestly). To quote the summary:

In late April 1999, the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), led by Marine General Anthony Zinni (ret.), conducted a series of war games known as Desert Crossing in order to assess potential outcomes of an invasion of Iraq aimed at unseating Saddam Hussein. The documents posted here today covered the initial pre-war game planning phase from April-May 1999 through the detailed after-action reporting of June and July 1999.

...

General Zinni, who retired in 2000 shortly after the completion of Desert Crossing, brought the report to the attention of the public after the war. Even before the invasion, he had made his opposition to an imminent war widely known. In a major address at the Middle East Institute in October 2002, he disputed the view that war was either inevitable or desirable. On the question of establishing a new government to replace Saddam Hussein, he said, "God help us if we think this transition will occur easily." (Note 2)

Zinni disparaged the views of pro-war advocates who minimized the significance of Arab opinion: "I'm not sure which planet they live on, because it isn't the one I travel." In a Q&A after the speech, he declared that while it was necessary to deal with Saddam Hussein "eventually," "[t]hat could happen in many ways" short of war. "The question becomes how to sort out your priorities .... My personal view, and this is just personal, is that I think this isn't No. 1. It's maybe six or seven, and the affordability line may be drawn around five." (Note 3)

Zinni commented in depth publicly about Desert Crossing at UCLA in 2004 where he discussed the origins of the plan in the wake of the Desert Fox bombing campaign in 1998:

And it struck me then that we had a plan to defeat Saddam's army, but we didn't have a plan to rebuild Iraq. And so I asked the different agencies of government to come together to talk about reconstruction planning for Iraq. . . . I thought we ought to look at political reconstruction, economic reconstruction, security reconstruction, humanitarian need, services, and infrastructure development. We met in Washington, DC. We called the plan, and we gamed it out in the scenario, Desert Crossing. (Note 4)

Zinni noted the parallels to what eventually happened after the invasion as well as to the lack of interest elsewhere in the U.S. government for tackling the problems of reconstruction:

The first meeting surfaced all the problems that have exactly happened now. This was 1999. And when I took it back and looked at it, I said, we need a plan. Not all of this is a military responsibility. I went back to State Department, to the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, Department of Commerce and others and said, all right, how about you guys taking part of the plan. We need a plan in addition to the war plan for the reconstruction. Not interested. Would not look at it. (Note 5)

So the General decided to take action himself -- "because I was convinced nobody in Washington was going to plan for it, and we, the military, would get stuck with it."

Zinni claimed that his report had been forgotten only a few years later, stating: "When it looked like we were going in [to Iraq], I called back down to CENTCOM and said, 'You need to dust off Desert Crossing.' They said, 'What's that? Never heard of it.' So in a matter of just a few years it was gone. The corporate memory. And in addition I was told, 'We've been told not to do any of the planning. It would all be done in the Pentagon.'" (Note 6)

So, Ahmad Chalabi, what went wrong in Iraq in the war you helped to sell? “The Americans sold us out,” he tells longtime Baghdad reporter Dexter Filkins in a lengthy cover story in this coming Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, reviewed by E&P.

This oughta be good. Can't wait for Ledeen's reaction.

Before we invaded Iraq, it wasn't a free nation.
Today, after many spent shells and much spilled blood,
Iraq still isn't a free nation. A nation doesn't become free
by holding an election. That's one fundamental misconception
of the Bush administration. A nation cannot be free if it's
under foreign occupation. It cannot be free if it is
lawless, an anarchy. And that's clearly what Iraq is right
now.

You see, somewhere along the way, a moron got the
idea that you can fight and win a politically correct
war. This moron, instead of being despised, was
heeded with exactitude.

The only way to "free" the Iraqi people is to turn Iraq into an
American colony. Use overwhelming force. Throw out the sham
government, throw all the anti-American imams into prison, and
essentially clean house. Start Americanizing Iraq. Station trusted
American personnel in Iraq permanently, military and civilian.
Be as fair as you are strict. Control the press, control the education system, turn Iraq into a police state. Dig in and stay for 40, 80, 150 years.

That's what the British did to India, and India is BY FAR
the most democratic of the non-English-speaking nations in the
Commonwealth. Freedom is cultural. If you want to make a people free,
you have to erase their culture (at least partially)
and replace it with your own.

I've heard a lot of conservatives use Japan as a good model
for democratization. Well, what we're doing in Iraq only
bears a passing resemblance to what we did in Japan.
We turned Japan into a colony and remade it in our
image. If we're not willing to do the same in Iraq, we
should withdraw all of our troops immediately. Today.

Colonize or cut and run. Everything else is a wasteful sham.

Anyway, am I being overly cynical to think November surprise when I see this in today's paper?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/world/middleeast/05cnd-saddam.html?hp&ex=1162789200&en=55feeded58d269df&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Man, oh man, do I hope that Rove's much-reported giddy confidence about the election wasn't hinged on a hoped-for tidal wave of support stemming from the Saddam verdict. If that's his November surprise, the GOP really is doomed.

And I agree with him 100% -- except that I *do* hope it was that, and that it blows up in his face.

In recent months, military officers and enlisted marines say, the insurgents have been using snipers more frequently and with greater effect, disrupting the military’s operations and fueling a climate of frustration and quiet rage.

Across Iraq, the threat has become serious enough that in late October the military held an internal conference about it, sharing the experiences of combat troops and discussing tactics to counter it. There has been no ready fix.

The battalion commander of Sergeant Leach’s unit — the Second Battalion, Eighth Marines — recalled eight sniper hits on his marines in three months and said there had been other possible incidents as well. Two of the battalion’s five fatalities have come from snipers, he said, and one marine is in a coma. Another marine gravely wounded by a sniper has suffered a stroke.

A sniper team was captured in the area a few weeks ago, he said, but more have taken its place. “The enemy has the ability to regenerate, and after we put a dent in his activity, we see sniper activity again,” said the commander, Lt. Col. Kenneth M. DeTreux.

“That’s the biggest thing that tears marines apart,” said Cpl. Curtis S. Cota-Robles of Company G, who was standing beside a marine who was shot through the collarbone in late September. “They hit us when we are vulnerable, and then they are gone.”

I hope and assume this was said in a tone of understandably weary frustration -- because if it was said in a tone of surprise, good god. (I would normally not be so cynical, but some of the milblogs out there act as if there's honor in war on all levels, which is truly astounding to see in this day and age.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u2ITs4yIAE&eurl=

Meantime, Khalilzad wants out. One blogger's take:

1. Khalilzad has given up on Iraq as a lost cause.

2. BushCo has decided to get rid of him in order to implement a change in policy (e.g., backing a coup that would produce an unparliamentary, strongman-led "government of national salvation" or, alternatively, backing partition).

3. BushCo has decided on a change of policy (a coup or partition) that Khalilzad wanted no part of.

4. Prime Minister al-Maliki is tired of Khalilzad's demands that the Iraqi Security Forces be purged of, and ordered to fight, the partisan/communal militias, and either told Khalilzad he was no longer welcome or sent word to Washington that he wanted a new ambassador.

Only one thing is certain: If Khalilzad still thought his strategy had a chance of success, he wouldn't be talking about leaving.

HMMMMM....

http://www.martinwildig.com/pictures/emperor.jpg

FIRST, LET'S GET one thing straight. Contrary to the suggestions sometimes heard on conservative talk radio, the terrible headlines out of Iraq aren't an invention of liberal news media. They all too accurately reflect the grim reality. Since the bombing of Samarra's mosque in February, at least 20,000 Iraqis have died violently and more than 230,000 have been displaced from their homes. The restraint once exercised by Shiites is gone; Shiite death squads have become as big a problem as Sunni terrorists.

aka, Max Boot suddenly sounding contrite...

----

Back to Iraq

By George Friedman

The midterm congressional elections have given the Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives. It is possible -- as of this writing, on Wednesday afternoon -- that the Senate could also go to the Democrats, depending on the outcome of one extremely close race in Virginia. However it finally turns out, it is quite certain that this midterm was a national election, in the sense that the dominant issue was not a matter of the local concerns in congressional districts, but the question of U.S. policy in Iraq. What is clear is that the U.S. electorate has shifted away from supporting the Bush administration's conduct of the war. What is not clear at all is what they have shifted toward. It is impossible to discern any consensus in the country as to what ought to be done.

Far more startling than the election outcome was the sudden resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld had become the lightning rod for critics of the war, including many people who had supported the war but opposed the way it was executed. Extraordinarily, President George W. Bush had said last week that Rumsfeld would stay on as secretary of defense until the end of his presidential term. It is possible that Rumsfeld surprised Bush by resigning in the immediate wake of the election -- but if that were the case, Bush would not have had a replacement already lined up by the afternoon of Nov. 8. The appointment of Robert Gates as secretary of defense means two things: One is that Rumsfeld's resignation was in the works for at least a while (which makes Bush's statement last week puzzling, to say the least); the other is that a shift is under way in White House policy on the war.

Gates is close to the foreign policy team that surrounded former President George H. W. Bush. Many of those people have been critical of, or at least uneasy with, the current president's Iraq policy. Moving a man like Gates into the secretary of defense position indicates that Bush is shifting away from his administration's original team and back toward an older cadre that was not always held in high esteem by this White House.

The appointment of Gates is of particular significance because he was a member of the Iraq Study Group (ISG). The ISG has been led by another member of the Bush 41 team, former Secretary of State James Baker. The current president created the ISG as a bipartisan group whose job was to come up with new Iraq policy options for the White House. The panel consisted of people who have deep experience in foreign policy and no pressing personal political ambitions. The members included former House Foreign Relations Committee chairman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, who co-chairs the group with Baker; former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican; former Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan; Leon Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration; former Clinton administration Defense Secretary William Perry; former Sen. Chuck Robb, a Democrat; Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming; and Edwin Meese, who served as attorney general under the Reagan administration.

Before Rumsfeld's resignation, it had not been entirely clear what significance the ISG report would have. For the Democrats -- controlling at least one chamber of Congress, and lacking any consensus themselves as to what to do about Iraq -- it had been expected that the ISG report would provide at least some platform from which to work, particularly if Bush did not embrace the panel's recommendations. And there had, in fact, been some indications from Bush that he would listen to the group's recommendations, but not necessarily implement them. Given the results of the Nov. 7 elections, it also could be surmised that the commission's report would become an internal issue for the Republican Party as well, as it looked ahead to the 2008 presidential campaign. With consensus that something must change, and no consensus as to what must change, the ISG report would be treated as a life raft for both Democrats and Republicans seeking a new strategy in the war. The resulting pressure would be difficult to resist, even for Bush. If he simply ignored the recommendations, he could lose a large part of his Republican base in Congress.

At this point, however, the question mark as to the president's response seems to have been erased, and the forthcoming ISG report soars in significance. For the administration, it would be politically unworkable to appoint a member of the panel as secretary of defense and then ignore the policies recommended.

Situation Review

It is, of course, not yet clear precisely what policy the administration will be adopting in Iraq. But to envision what sort of recommendations the ISG might deliver, we must first consider the current strategy.

Essentially, U.S. strategy in Iraq is to create an effective coalition government, consisting of all the major ethnic and sectarian groups. In order to do that, the United States has to create a security environment in which the government can function. Once this has been achieved, the Iraqi government would take over responsibility for security. The problem, however, is twofold. First, U.S. forces have not been able to create a sufficiently secure environment for the government to function. Second, there are significant elements within the coalition that the United States is trying to create who either do not want such a government to work -- and are allied with insurgents to bring about its failure -- or who want to improve their position within the coalition, using the insurgency as leverage. In other words, U.S. forces are trying to create a secure environment for a coalition whose members are actively working to undermine the effort.

The core issue is that no consensus exists among Iraqi factions as to what kind of country they want. This is not only a disagreement among Sunnis, Shia and Kurds, but also deep disagreements within these separate groups as to what a national government (or even a regional government, should Iraq be divided) should look like. It is not that the Iraqi government in Baghdad is not doing a good job, or that it is corrupt, or that it is not motivated. The problem is that there is no Iraqi government as we normally define the term: The "government" is an arena for political maneuvering by mutually incompatible groups.

Until the summer of 2006, the U.S. strategy had been to try to forge some sort of understanding among the Iraqi groups, using American military power as a goad and guarantor of any understandings. But the decision by the Shia, propelled by Iran, to intensify operations against the Sunnis represented a deliberate decision to abandon the political process. More precisely, in our view, the Iranians decided that the political weakness of George W. Bush, the military weakness of U.S. forces in Iraq, and the general international environment gave them room to reopen the question of the nature of the coalition, the type of regime that would be created and the role that Iran could play in Iraq. In other words, the balanced coalition government that the United States wanted was no longer attractive to the Iranians and Iraqi Shia. They wanted more.

The political foundation for U.S. military strategy dissolved. The possibility of creating an environment sufficiently stable for an Iraqi government to operate -- when elements of the Iraqi government were combined with Iranian influence to raise the level of instability -- obviously didn't work. The United States might have had enough force in place to support a coalition government that was actively seeking and engaged in stabilization. It did not have enough force to impose its will on multiple insurgencies that were supported by factions of the government the United States was trying to stabilize.

By the summer of 2006, the core strategy had ceased to function.

The Options

It is in this context that the ISG will issue its report. There have been hints as to what the group might recommend, but the broad options boil down to these:

1. Recommend that the United States continue with the current strategy: military operations designed to create a security environment in which an Iraqi government can function.

2. Recommend the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and allow the Iraqis to sort out their political problems.

3. Recommend a redeployment of forces in Iraq, based around a redefinition of the mission.

4. Recommend a redefinition of the political mission in Iraq.

We are confident that the ISG will not recommend a continuation of the first policy. James Baker has already hinted at the need for change, since it is self-evident at this point that the existing strategy isn't working. It is possible that the strategy could work eventually, but there is no logical reason to believe that this will happen anytime soon, particularly as the president has now been politically weakened. The Shia and Iranians, at this point, are even less likely to be concerned about Washington's military capability in Iraq than they were before the election. And at any rate, Baker and Hamilton didn't travel personally to Iraq only to come back and recommend the status quo.

Nor will they recommend an immediate withdrawal of troops. Apart from the personalities involved, the ISG participants are painfully aware that a unilateral withdrawal at this point, without a prior political settlement, would leave Iran as the dominant power in the region -- potentially capable of projecting military force throughout the Persian Gulf, as well as exerting political pressure through Shiite communities in Gulf states. Only the United States has enough force to limit the Iranians at this point, and an immediate withdrawal from Iraq would leave a huge power vacuum.

We do believe that the ISG will recommend a fundamental shift in the way U.S. forces are used. The troops currently are absorbing casualties without moving closer to their goal, and it is not clear that they can attain it. If U.S. forces remain in Iraq -- which will be recommended -- there will be a shift in their primary mission. Rather than trying to create a secure environment for the Iraqi government, their mission will shift to guaranteeing that Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria, do not gain further power and influence in Iraq. Nothing can be done about the influence they wield among Iraqi Shia, but the United States will oppose anything that would allow them to move from a covert to an overt presence in Iraq. U.S. forces will remain in-country but shift their focus to deterring overt foreign intrusion. That means a redeployment and a change in day-to-day responsibility. U.S. forces will be present in Iraq but not conducting continual security operations.

Two things follow from this. First, the Iraqis will be forced to reach a political accommodation with each other or engage in civil war. The United States will concede that it does not have the power to force them to agree or to prevent them from fighting. Second, the issue of Iran -- its enormous influence in Iraq -- will have to be faced directly, or else U.S. troops will be tied up there indefinitely.

It has been hinted that the ISG is thinking of recommending that Washington engage in negotiations with Iran over the future of Iraq. Tehran offered such negotiations last weekend, and this has been the Iranian position for a while. There have been numerous back-channel discussions, and some open conversations, between Washington and Tehran. The stumbling block has been that the United States has linked the possibility of these talks to discussions of Iran's nuclear policy; Iran has rejected that, always seeking talks on Iraq without linkages. If the rumors are true, and logic says they are, the ISG will suggest that Washington should delink the nuclear issue and hold talks with Iran about a political settlement over Iraq.

This is going to be the hard part for Bush. The last thing he wants is to enhance Iranian power. But the fact is that Iranian power already has been enhanced by the ability of Iraqi Shia to act with indifference to U.S. wishes. By complying with this recommendation, Washington would not be conceding much. It would be acknowledging reality. Of course, publicly acknowledging what has happened is difficult, but the alternative is a continuation of the current strategy -- also difficult. Bush has few painless choices.

What a settlement with Iran would look like is, of course, a major question. We have discussed that elsewhere. For the moment, the key issue is not what a settlement would look like but whether there can be a settlement at all with Iran -- or even direct discussions. In a sense, that is a more difficult problem than the final shape of an agreement.

We expect the ISG, therefore, to make a military and political recommendation. Militarily, the panel will argue for a halt in aggressive U.S. security operations and a redeployment of forces in Iraq, away from areas of unrest. Security will have to be worked out by the Iraqis -- or not. Politically, the ISG will argue that Washington will have to talk directly to the other major stakeholder, and power broker, in Iraq: Tehran.

In short, the group will recommend a radical change in the U.S. approach not only to Iraq, but to the Muslim world in general.

The bipartisan study group, co-chaired by Baker and former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), probably will not replace Gates because it is so late in the process. After intense meetings in recent months, the group still has not reached any conclusions, said one person familiar with its workings.

It is scheduled to meet with Bush on Monday. After that session, it will have its first round of meetings, stretching over three days, to try to reach a consensus on recommendations for a new direction in Iraq. But insiders do not expect it to reach conclusions quickly or easily, so another round of meetings has been scheduled for the end of the month. The group hopes to release its report around Dec. 7, but it may not meet that goal.

Number of US dead this month: 21.

would it make sense to let iranian and syrian security forces into the shi'ite and sunni areas? is that just craziness?

Interesting times, as they say. To wit -- this story:

A top U.S. intelligence official has been meeting with Middle East counterparts to discuss proposals expected from the Baker commission on Iraq, Middle East sources have told Newsday.

Which is not too surprising at this point. Where this comes into play over here is this paranoid reaction at PowerLine, one of the most extreme Bush-supporting blogs. As the piece concludes:

As far as I can see, the "realists" haven't had a new idea in thirty years. What does Israel have to do with the fact that Shia and Sunni Muslims want to tear each other to pieces? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I'll say it again: the idea that pressuring Israel to compromise its security will somehow, magically, solve the Iraqis' problems is delusional. Maybe Baker et al., know something I don't, but the idea that Iran and Syria will cooperate to bring peace to that region appears equally far-fetched.

So, under the Baker Commission's recommendations, what will become of the 12 million Iraqis who voted for freedom and for a normal life? President Bush has said more times than I can count, in speeches spanning the last four years, that all people want to be free, and that freedom is God's gift to all mankind. If he doesn't believe that, then what does he believe?

If the Iraqis are to be sold out, at least let them be sold out by the Democrats. No one expected anything better from them.

(Keep in mind the author of this little rant, John Hinderaker, is beyond embarrassing in his slavering adoration for Bush; only Hewitt rivals him, I think. Seeing him slam up against realpolitik is amusing if hardly comforting for anyone on the ground.)

Belgravia, meanwhile, pulls out a telling enough bit from this Washington Post story (worth reading in general as a status report, essentially):

[Bill] Kristol related a curious anecdote from his September appearance before the panel to promote a plan to provide more troops for security in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Then-panel member Robert M. Gates--who quit the group Friday after Bush nominated him as defense secretary-- asked Kristol why he thought the president was so determined to stick with Donald H. Rumsfeld as the Pentagon chief.

Kristol replied that he was mystified -- at which point, as he recalled it, Baker interjected with the comment, "Well, you can't expect the president to do anything until after the election."

While all this goes on, Maliki makes noises about shuffling his cabinet -- while over 150 people, at least, died over the day. A lovely detail:

In Baqouba, the Iraqi army's provincial public affairs office said troops found 50 bodies dumped behind the offices of the provincial electric company.

Nineteen of the bodies were taken to the morgue in Baqouba and the army was waiting for U.S. bomb disposal teams, fearing the 31 other bodies behind the electrical company were rigged with explosives.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1947359,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6146152.stm

Higher Education Minister Abd Dhiab ordered all Baghdad's universities to close until the security situation improved.

So, no school for the next 3-5 years?

Not that that will necessarily solve anything.

Perhaps the worst thing in this article is the bit started...
'In other developments:'
Followed by a litany of carnage...

It appears that at least some of the people have now been freed. I guess it must be quite difficult (even in Iraq) to keep 100 people hidden.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6148100.stm

Love this bit:

One academic here likened Iraq to a troublesome child that will eventually force his divorced parents - America and Iran - to reconcile.

"We will talk to the US government under certain conditions. Should it correct its behaviour, we will talk to them"

I'm waiting for him to put something on his blog about the whole situation...

There was a news story that ran recently about open sectarian mortar battles in Baghdad - oddly that story has not gotten much traction in the US news. But now, this:

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/KHA527238.htm

I'm with you Ned, that story is getting odder for the hour...
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20766457-1702,00.html

Basically, I imagine, it's a sunni politician (the Education guy) saying that the Shias in charge of the ministry of the interior are in cahoots with the militias and he's not coming back until that's sorted out and arrested a few cops ain't gonna cut it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1948748,00.html

"You've got to remember, whatever the Democrats say, it's Bush still calling the shots. He believes it's a matter of political will. That's what [Henry] Kissinger told him. And he's going to stick with it," a former senior administration official said.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/duh_bya.jpg

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

As Sullivan has noted elsewhere, situations like this are why:

Capt. Stephanie A. Bagley and the military police company she commands arrived in Iraq in December 2005 brimming with optimism about taking on one of the most urgent tasks in Iraq: building a new police force.

Now, as the 21st Military Police Company approaches the end of a deployment marked by small victories and enormous disappointments, Captain Bagley is focused on a more modest goal.

“I just want to get everyone home,” she said. In the past several weeks, Captain Bagley, 30, barred her troops from foot patrols in the most violent neighborhoods and eliminated all nonessential travel. “I’m just not willing to lose another soldier,” she said.

The true believers are still out there, though I get a feeling they're starting to feel the ground shift. Sites like BlackFive have been calling attention to this piece written by a military reserve major who's served in Iraq that outlines 'six steps to victory' in a ground-up sense. It's an understandable expression of frustration, but I honestly don't think it will help them now, not at this stage of the game.

Iraqi death toll in the past eight days -- at least 700. At LEAST. American deaths this month -- 53 and counting.

Meantime:

The U.S. military's effort to train Iraqi forces has been rife with problems, from officers being sent in with poor preparation to a lack of basic necessities such as interpreters and office materials, according to internal Army documents.

The shortcomings have plagued a program that is central to the U.S. strategy in Iraq and is growing in importance. A Pentagon effort to rethink policies in Iraq is likely to suggest placing less emphasis on combat and more on training and advising, sources say.

The whole neocon project has been a colossal failure. Even George W. Bush must now know this. The [Middle East] will not adopt consensual government any time soon. There is a case for KBO in Iraq — Adam Brodsky has put it very neatly — but nobody of any consequence thinks we shall remake that country in our own image, or anything like it. A lot of us never believed it anyway, though most of us are much too nice to go around now saying “I told you so.”

Or should I say, maybe global politics ain't black and white like we thought they was?

http://www.25frames.org/media/screens/957.jpg