As I have said in previous posts, the civil war underway in Iraq is breaking the way of the Shia. Moqtada al Sadr's Mehdi Army and the Badr militia are the big boys on the block with the muscle and means to enforce their will. Both are backed by Iran. Most of our troops are attacking Sunni insurgents and terrorists. The Shias generally avoid attacking us because, why antagonize us when we're doing their dirty work for them.

I cannot wait to watch how George and Condi will square this circle. We're helping a group of Shia religious extremists who have close ties to Iran consolidate power in Iraq. Meanwhile, we're threatening Iran with dire consequences if they don't surrender their nuclear program. This Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde policy is getting our kids killed and putting our security at risk. And now, worst of all, on top of the abuses of Abu Ghraib, we are perceived as tolerating, if not sanctioning, the torture and rape of Sunni prisoners.

Will George and Rummy wind up at the Hague some day and be asked to answer for Saddam style rape rooms? Just a thought.

In an emollient bridge-building performance at a summit with the European Union in Vienna's Hofburg castle, Mr Bush underlined his recently stated goal of closing the US's controversial detention centre in Guantánamo.

"I'd like to end Guantánamo; I'd like it to be over with," he said, adding that he had shared with European leaders "my deep desire to end this programme".

EU leaders extracted a White House pledge to accelerate the conclusion of a deal to free up transatlantic air travel, which has been blocked by the US Congress. "I hope we will reach finalisation of the air transport agreement . . .by the end of the year," said José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president.

The summit capped a transformation in US-European relations that has seen Washington move closer to the EU on issues such as Iran and aid to the Palestinians, but which has left European public opinion unmoved - partly because of concerns over the mistreatment of detainees in the fight against terrorism.

European diplomats said they were favourably impressed by Mr Bush's decision to bring up the issue of Guantánamo before it was raised by the Europeans. He said he faced a dilemma because of "international pressure" that made it difficult to repatriate prisoners, and because US courts have blocked plans to try some detainees before military commissions.

The US recently had to convince Albania to give asylum to five Chinese Muslims after their release from Guantánamo. The men feared persecution as an ethnic minority in China.

In spite of the warm mood at the summit, Mr Bush angrily dismissed polls in Europe on the threat posed by the US, saying "it's absurd for people to think we're more dangerous than Iran". The FT/Harris poll conducted last week said 36 per cent of people in five European countries considered the US the biggest threat to world stability, ahead of Iran and China.

Mr Bush made conciliatory gestures on trade, indicating he would try to find a compromise to prevent failure of the "Doha round" world trade talks.

US farm lobby groups and their congressional allies have been urging the administration to let the talks fail rather than accept a deal that does not offer big new export opportunities for US farmers, which would require significant additional concessions by the EU. But Mr Bush said the leaders had "very frank discussions" that acknowledged problems on both sides.

"My view is we can't let the round fail," he added in a comment that contrasted with that of Susan Schwab, his new trade representative, who said failure was better than a bad deal.

Mr Barroso also stressed bilateral co-operation on issues such as developing a common energy security agenda, steps to protect intellectual property rights and a dialogue on climate change.

"It should be a joint solution where Europe and other parts of the world should play an active part," he said.

U.S. President George W. Bush was criticized about the detention centre during his European trip this week.

Following Wednesday's summit with EU officials in Vienna, Bush said he wanted to close Guantanamo and send detainees back to their home countries, but that some of the prisoners were dangerous and "cold-blooded killers."

"They will murder somebody if they are let out on the street," he said.

Arrangements would have to be made, he said, to ensure the detainees wouldn't pose a public threat after their release.

But Nowak said he believes only a "very very small" percentage of detainees pose a threat.

Bush said 200 detainees had been sent home, and that of the 460 remaining, most were from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Afghanistan.

The U.S. has used the prison to hold hundreds of people believed to have links with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Last month, the UN released a report saying the United States should stop using the prison and either release all the prisoners there or put them on trial.

Kim Jong-il's government in Pyongyang, after learning that they were being targeted due to the American accusation that they were "evil," decided that the most effective way to keep the United States at bay was to create a military force powerful enough to deter the United States from aggression. After all, the Bush administration showed their respect for treaties by abrogating them one by one; it was not surprising that Pyongyang was nervous that the U.S. might also act in defiance of the 1953 armistice. In order to combat this perceived threat, the North released information that it was attempting to create more nuclear weapons, implying that it already had a few ready to launch.

Their nuclear weapons admission, or bluff, sent fear through the United States and caused a public relations calamity for the Bush White House. In the middle of planning an attack on Iraq, under the pretense of eliminating Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, suddenly North Korea came out actually admitting they had nuclear weapons! This statement by the North was smartly released only after the U.S. was becoming bogged down in the Middle East.

The crisis worked effectively, as the United States began to have to consider the grievances of North Korea. More importantly, North Korea was able to bring its political issues to the forefront of the world press at a time when the United States could only wave a threatening stick at Pyongyang.

Furthermore, North Korea jabbed the sword even deeper into the heart of White House rhetoric when they claimed that Pyongyang reserved the right to preemptively attack hostile nations! Pyongyang's clever strategy turned Washington's preemption policy on its head and left the Bush administration without an adequate response.

Since then, the administration has offered some economic incentives to the North, in exchange for Pyongyang's disarmament. So far, the North has refused to budge and continues to head down the path of creating nuclear weapons. Because the United States is preoccupied with Iraq, Pyongyang seems to be holding out for the best deal possible. Through their nuclear weapon bargaining piece, they are trying to squeeze lucrative concessions out of the United States in exchange for Pyongyang's silence. In fact, this is such a concern to the administration that it has caused Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to constantly reassure that the United States is capable of fighting a war in Korea and Iraq at the same time; however, as we have seen through history, tough words such as Rumsfeld's are usually used to cover up falsities.

This is where the danger lies in the Bush administration's policy of arm bending diplomacy. North Korea, knowing that the Bush administration is trying to keep the North's issues on the backburner right now, will attempt to pressure the White House into giving up great concessions to Pyongyang. If the Bush administration refuses to meet the North's demands, then the North will probably just continue to work on building their nuclear arsenal. The North figures it is a no-lose situation. Either Pyongyang will secure large economic concessions from the United States, or they will increase their nuclear forces.

In the case that North Korea creates or increases their nuclear arsenal, it will simply provide them with even more bargaining chips for the future. It is more difficult for a powerful nation like the United States to manhandle a nuclear capable country, especially when 37,000 U.S. troops are stationed on its border. Even in the case of a conventional war, the North would not only be able to cause massive U.S. casualties, but would be able to decimate the South Korean capital of Seoul within hours since it lies so close to the border, well within the range of North Korean firepower. The South is well aware of this and is no doubt putting pressure on the United States to refrain from creating another crisis on the Korean peninsula.

So, while to the outside observer it may look as if North Korea is following an irrational policy, it is actually coherent and follows the model set forth by the Bush administration. That policy is the theory of power politics, where states use threats to coerce other states into diplomatic concessions. The simple danger is that the threat of preemption, intertwined in the general theory of power politics, can often lead to unexpected conflicts that quickly spiral out of control.

[Ash Pulcifer is a U.S. based analyst of international conflicts and is also a human rights activist. While he does not justify or accept the killing of civilians in warfare, he attempts to understand why groups or governments resort to such means in order to achieve their strategic objectives.]

http://www.YellowTimes.org

President Bush's surprise appearance in Baghdad was supposed to shore up support for the flagging mission in Iraq, but according to the memo, even the Green Zone, that one safe-haven in an ocean of resistance, could come under attack in the very near future.

Clearly, if the militia violence and infighting increase much more, American troops will be forced to withdraw quicker than planned. In practical terms, the country is already ungovernable and the newly-elected regime is merely a face to show-off to the anxious American public.

There's considerable disagreement among critics of the war about how we got to this point. Some believe that Iraq was never going to submit to occupation regardless of how it was carried out. Others argue that the resistance only emerged in reaction to a poorly planned occupation that was unable to provide even minimal security for Iraqi civilians. Most of the criticism has been directed at Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a man of limited abilities who is incapable of learning from his mistakes. The most scathing rebuke of Rumsfeld came from his own Major General John Batiste in his article "Root Causes of Haditha" which outlines the many grievous tactical and strategic errors Rumsfeld made following the fall of Baghdad. Batiste says:

"America went to war in Iraq with the secretary of defense's plan. He ignored the U.S. Central Command's deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build his plan, which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace and set Iraq up for self-reliance. He refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency....Bottom line, his plan allowed the insurgency to take root and grow to where it is today. Our great military lost a critical window of opportunity to secure Iraq because of inadequate troop levels and the decision to stand down the Iraqi security forces."

Most of what Batiste says squares with the facts as we now know them. There was no plan for occupation and Dick Cheney later admitted on FOX TV that they were frankly surprised at the amount of violence they encountered. The fantasists in the White House expected that the Saddam regime would fall like a house of cards and that the people would greet them as liberators. Contingency plans from the Pentagon and the State Dept were ignored in a breathtaking display of hubris. Even so, Iraqis seemed to take a "wait and see" attitude and it was almost a full year before the resistance was up and running at full speed. If the civilian leadership at the Pentagon had taken the mounting attacks on coalition troops seriously, they may have reversed their strategy and not brushed aside the perpetrators as "dead-enders and ex-Ba'athists".

Falluja; the turning point

Then there was Falluja. After the killing and desecrating of the 4 Blackwater agents in Falluja, Rumsfeld decided to exact punishment by reducing a city of 250,000 to rubble. Nearly two years later, independent photographers and journalists are still banned from photographing the wreckage.

Many believe that Falluja and Abu Ghraib made the war "unwinnable"; that the "hearts and minds" part of occupation was no longer feasible. Now, American forces must depend on brute force and counterinsurgency operations to pacify an increasingly suspicious and hostile public. That project is failing and mayhem is spreading across the Sunni heartland making occupation more and more untenable.

But the Bush administration faces another dilemma that is even more basic than beating the resistance. They desperately need a strategy for victory and they have no idea of what that might be. There's no way that Bush can achieve his goals without knowing what those goals are. It seems obvious, but the administration is utterly clueless. Up to now, the strategy has been to simply ensure that "we kill more of them then they do of us", but that, of course, does not provide a political solution and an end to the conflict.

Representative John Murtha keeps harping away at this one point but, no one in the congress seems to grasp what he's talking about. They look at him like a madman while they continue to dawdle on meaningless resolutions that merely extend the war into perpetuity.

"There's no plan!" Murtha said on Meet the Press. "You open up this plan for victory. There's no plan there. It's just, 'Stay the course.' That doesn't solve the problem. It's worse today than it was six months ago when I spoke out initially. When I spoke out, the garbage wasn't being collected, oil production below pre-War level -- all those things indicated to me we weren't winning this, and it's the same today, if not worse."

Murtha's frustration is palpable. He's the only man in congress who seems to have a grip on the calamity that looms ahead. The rest don't understand that the United States is losing this war and that a defeat in Iraq will precipitate a seismic shift in the lives of every American.

"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised" Murtha said. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion....It is time for a change in direction.... Our military has done its duty. They've been fighting a war in Iraq for over two and a half years and now the Administration agrees, Iraq can not be won 'militarily.'.... We can not continue on the present course. The future of our country is at risk."

"Iraq can not be won 'militarily'".

Murtha's pleas have had little effect on the political landscape. Bush still totters from one photo-op to the next, the media keeps fear-mongering on Al Qaida, and the Congress continues to regurgitate Rove's silly "cut and run" mantra.

In 3 years of unrelenting bloodshed, the Bush administration has never pursued a political solution. No dialogue, no diplomacy, no negotiations. There's still the naïve belief that violence alone can achieve their objectives and that America will prevail in any conflict. The administration's arrogance has set them up for a crushing defeat.

Author Sidney Blumenthal says this about the administration's approach,

"The Bush way of war has been ahistorical and apolitical, and therefore warped strategically, putting absolute pressure on the military to provide an outcome it cannot provide - 'victory.'"

As the situation in Iraq continues to worsen, Bush refuses to make any adjustments to his approach; insisting that success is just a matter of "staying the course". But "victory" is not achievable by perseverance alone; there must intelligence and concrete objectives. An army of 130,000 will not overcome a population of 25 million without tangible goals and a realistic plan for providing security.

Bush ignores military strategist Carl von Clausewitz axiom that "War is politics by other means" Von Clausewitz added, "Subordinating the political point of view to the military would be absurd; for it is policy that creates war. Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument, not vice versa." (Thomas Barton)

Bush confuses missiles with foresight, and tanks with political acumen. The results are predictably disastrous.

For Bush, war is a self-ennobling activity that demonstrates the grandiose power of the aggressor but precludes any final resolution. It is merely mindless, indiscriminate violence directed outwards.

After 3 years, the administration still knows next to nothing about its adversary. So far, the resistance has succeeded in all its main aims; frustrating every attempt to establish security, rebuild infrastructure, or to transport oil. The administration has strengthened the resistances' resolve and swelled their ranks by torturing prisoners, killing civilians, and decimating towns and cities. The vast majority of Iraqis now want the occupation to end and 46% believe that fighters are justified in killing American soldiers.

The United States is now fighting battle-hardened Iraqi nationalists who will not give up or give in until America is compelled to withdraw its troops. But, that is only a small part of the problem. As Khalizad's memo indicates, the society has broken down into tribal units forming vast, fully-armed militias which have stepped up to fill the security vacuum. The militias have wormed there way into every area of Iraqi society and, now, are active even in the Green Zone; creating a viable threat to the American stronghold.

No wonder Khalizad is alarmed.

In a USA Today article about the memo, the editor says, (The memo) "underscores the uphill battle faced by the fledgling Iraqi government and US forces, the limited time they have to assert control, and even whether that is still possible. ...The fundamentalists and militias are fast obtaining the kind of power that destroys governments. To whit: 'The central government, our staff says, is not relevant.'"

The country is controlled by the militias and the resistance. The United States controls nothing beyond the block-walls and gun-towers of the besieged Green Zone, and now, even that may be in jeopardy. As Patrick Cockburn presciently noted, the memo "portrays a society in the state of collapse."

Fisk's Crystal Ball

Months ago, author Robert Fisk said that he could foresee a dramatic event taking place in Iraq that would reshape the public's attitude towards the war; something comparable to the TET Offensive in Vietnam, which was the turning point for America's fortunes in that war.

Could the disparate Iraqi resistance actually mount an attack on the Green Zone, the last refuge for America's puppet regime?

Here's what Fisk says:

"Sometimes I wonder if there will be a moment when reality and myth, truth and lies, will actually collide. When will the detonation come? When the insurgents wipe out an entire US base? When they pour over the walls of the Green Zone and turn it into the same trashed blocks as the rest of Baghdad? Or will we then be told-as we have been in the past-that this just shows the "desperation" of the insurgents, that these terrible acts only prove that the "terrorist" know they are losing?" (Robert Fisk, "What does Democracy really mean in the Middle East" Aug, 2005)

Khalizad's frantic memo seems to indicate that such an assault is possible and that the occupants should prepare accordingly.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak anticipated the Iraqi debacle nearly two years ago when he cautioned Dick Cheney, "There's no way to win an occupation. It's just a matter of choosing the size of your humiliation."

That was good advice, but it was ignored.

Bush was also warned strenuously before he began his Iraqi crusade. He was told that if he invaded he would be "kicking open the gates of hell".

We'll soon find out whether he's prepared to deal with the trouble inside.

Second, they might add, some of Iran's new decision-makers seem savory enough for India-like negotiating with the possible outcome of Russians and Europeans being, slowly but surely, squeezed out of what will then turn into a new promising playground.

True, the old "you can never trust the Russians, better try the West" approach is already circulating across Iranian society, especially among people who have relatives in the United States. This is what they call a true intrigue, one that makes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's dream come true -- finally the Russians are being labeled as "undependable partners" by Iranian ayatollahs, who used to be so loyal to them.

But these subtleties are also exactly what diehard Republican conservatives despise Rice for, putting on her all the blame for "sluggish progress" on Iran.

Although the gap between neocons and moderates is so narrow that any inconvenience with Iran -- for example, a single Ahmadinejad offensive remark on Israel -- might prompt most moderates to suddenly turn hawkish, some of the turns and twists of the U.S.-Iran nuclear debate are truly remarkable.

There seems to be a consensus on describing the ideology-driven President Ahmadinejad as the greatest obstacle to a possible Washington-Tehran deal. Ahmadinejad is popular with the Iranian youth -- not the urban yuppies craving for Western mass culture but the poor rural Muslim people who appreciate his youth development programs.

So the U.S. intelligence people, well aware that the president is foreign to the narrow group of nuclear decision-makers, wonder how then he managed to win the election against the rich and powerful Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The obvious American question here is "where's the money?" To some, the answer is very easy and simple: it's the Russians again. If anyone sees a "Russian oil money propelled Ahmadinejad to power" headline in a U.S. newspaper tomorrow, they should look no further than this essay. Ridiculous? We have seen more ridiculous things, thank you very much, that were printed and sold as perfectly true.

Meanwhile, United States Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte and Rice are setting up their own Iran think tanks, including a special office on Iran at the State Department. While this is a sign of hope that the military option is currently not the first on the table, and what Ahmadinejad told Putin in Shanghai sounds plausible enough, everyone needs to do more.

Iran, for its part, should move faster to walk the walk on its deliberations with the "Iranian Six." Dragging out the issue would clearly not be in its best interests as it would play straight into the hands of the hawks over the Atlantic.

(Lt. Gen. Gennady Yevstafyev, Ret., is a former senior officer of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, also known as the SVR. He is now a senior adviser at the Center for Policy Studies in Russia or PIR Center. This article is reprinted by permission of RIA Novosti)

According to the poll, quoted by Iran News Internet daily, only 23% of Russians favor economic sanctions, whereas 68% of Americans think some form of trade or sales embargo against Tehran is appropriate.

On the flip side, when asked whether the United Nations Security Council should still negotiate even "if Iran continues to produce nuclear fuel that could be developed for use in nuclear weapons," 62% of respondents in Russia said "yes," while 26% of Americans opined that there was nothing more to talk about, according to the poll.

The poll was jointly carried out by the independent Yuri Levada Institute in Russia, and the World Public Opinion Institute in the United States.

Oil prices would skyrocket if reports claiming any imminent aggression appeared, the ambassador said. Venezuela would also take advantage of Latin America's solidarity agreements, he said.

Venezuela has raised worries in the United States by purchasing a large batch of assault rifles from Russia and reportedly being in talks to buy several Russian combat aircraft.