Since then, numerous search parties have been launched to comb that patch of forest for more evidence of the bird's existence, and scientists have been examining the video frame by frame and debating whether it really depicts an ivory-billed woodpecker or just a more common, similar-looking pileated woodpecker. Has this lost creature revealed itself to human eyes again after six decades -- or is the bird a figment of our wishful thinking? One thing is certain, says Duke University conservation biologist Stuart Pimm:"If it survives, it's a lonely bird."

Lonely, except that in one sense it has lots of company: species that are lost, or nearly so, are increasingly common because human activities are driving them to extinction 1,000 times faster than the normal rate, according to the just-released report, Global Biodiversity Outlook 2. The report echoes the United Nations'Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, published last year, and proclaims that a "sixth mass extinction" is under way, the worst loss of species since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

Such dire claims have attracted some skeptics, however. Mostly journalists and economists, they start with the argument that nobody even knows how many other species share the planet, so how can anyone claim to know what the extinction rate is? Taxonomists have named and described around 1.5 million species, but estimates of the actual total range from 5 million to over 15 million. A frequently cited mid-range estimate is 7 million species, but that's by no means an exact or universally accepted figure.

Because ofthis uncertainty, says Pimm, the aim should be simply to calculate a relative extinction rate rather than the absolute number of disappearing species. Pimm and a group of colleagues first laid out these ideas in a 1995 paper in Science that has become probably the most widely accepted approach to quantifying species loss.

Only a few of those 1.5 million described species are known well enough to assess how they're doing; what's known about many species derives from single specimens hiding in dusty museum cabinets somewhere. So in order to say something meaningful about extinction rates, it's necessary to pick a well-known group of organisms and treat them as a sample ofthe larger total. Fortunately for Pimm, an ornithologist, birds make a good sample group. Although there are still occasional surprises, it's generally well known how many kinds of birds there are, which ones have disappeared, and when. And, he says, the fact that there are just about 10,000 species of birds in the world greatly simplifies the arithmetic involved.

About 130 kinds of birds have vanished around the world over the past century and a half. That's a pretty firm number: "We have a body count and we have names," Pimm says. There's the great auk, for example, driven to extinction in the 19th century by hunters who sought its feathers, meat, and oil. There's the Lana'i hookbill, lost in the early 1900s when its habitat was destroyed for pineapple plantations, and the New Zealand bush wren, a ground nester that proved easy prey for introduced rats and was last sighted in 1972. The bird extinction rate is about one per 10,000 species per year, or 100 extinctions per million species per year, since the middle ofthe 19th century. Of course, extinction is a natural process; no species lives forever. So the real question is how the current extinction rate compares to the usual rate at which species come and go (the back-

ground rate).

To determine the background extinction rate, scientists look to the fossil record and to genetic material, or DNA, which accumulates small changes in its sequence as it is copied and passed down from generation to generation. Because these minor copying mistakes occur at a known rate, they can act as "molecular clocks" to help establish how long ago closely related species diverged and to track other aspects of species history. This evidence suggests that under normal circumstances species survive for one million to 10 million years. If species typically lived for only one million years,then we ought to see one extinction per million species- years, or one per million species per year." And so what that tells us is that the rate of bird extinctions is a hundred times greater than it should be," says Pimm.

In their 1995 paper, Pimm and his colleagues also performed similar analyses of mammals, reptiles, frogs and toads, and freshwater clams (dividing the number of extinctions witnessed over the past century by the total number of known species in each of these groups) and came up with similar results: current extinction rates are two orders of magnitude above normal. But the real body count is likely to be even higher, because species usually don't go extinct immediately when their habitats are destroyed, exotic predators arrive, or they otherwise come to ecological harm. Instead, they often hang on for decades or even longer before disappearing forever.

Habitat destruction is a major cause ofspecies loss and has accelerated rapidly in recent years, especially in the world's most species-rich environments -- about half the original extent of tropical moist forest has been lost, for example, most of it in the last 50 years -- so it's likely that many extinctions have not yet had time to occur. That means the number of threatened and endangered species (those that are likely to go extinct in the next few decades without human intervention to save them) might be a better assessment ofthe probable toll than simply the number of recent extinctions.

The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists 1,213 birds as threatened,about 12 percent of all avian species. "Which means that by the end ofthe century we could expect that probably a thousand species of birds might disappear," Pimm says. That would be 10 extinctions per 10,000 species per year, or 1,000 times the background extinction rate. The numbers for other well-known groups are similar, if not worse: 20 percent of the world's mammal species appear on the IUCN Red List of threatened species.

Not all scientists agree that hundred- to thousand-fold increased extinction rates among birds and a few other well-known groups mean that all kinds of species are disappearing at the same rates. "There are just so many differences among, even within, taxa, how species respond to the kinds of forces that are causing extinction," says Daniel Simberloff, an ecologist at the University ofTennessee in Knoxville. Do the patterns we see in birds, which make up just 0.6 percent of known species, necessarily apply to insects, which account for 54 percent?

Pimm and Simberloff were once colleagues at the University of Tennessee and know each other's work well.(Pimm even likes to joke that one of Simberloff's primary research interests is "pointing out Stuart Pimm's mistakes.") "There are certainly lots of credible scientists who don't like the extrapolation methods and would argue with aspects of them," Simberloff says.

Yet within the scientific community, the debate over extinction rates is about details, like just how much extrapolation is appropriate, rather than the big picture." I don't know of any credible environmental scientist that doesn't think that extinctions are happening at greatly increased rates," Simberloff says. To him, high extinction rates among birds and other well-known groups are evidence enough ofa biodiversity crisis -- regardless of what the exact patterns might prove to be among other kinds of species.

Moreover, as researchers have begun to look more closely at those other groups of species, all evidence suggests that things are just as bad, if not worse, than studies of birds and mammals indicate. According to a Nature Conservancy study, dragonflies and beetles are more highly threatened than birds in North America. In the sea, where many scientists had long believed that species would be relatively shielded from extinction risk, more than 40 percent of a subfamily ofgroupers meet IUCN criteria for imperilment, says Callum Roberts, a marine conservation biologist at the University of York in the United Kingdom. Most marine species have not yet been assessed.

In a study comparing population trends among butterflies, birds, and plants in Britain, a group ofecologists led by Jeremy Thomas of the National Environment Research Council in Dorchester found that butterflies fared the worst in recent decades. Seventy-one percent of butterfly species declined over the course of the study, compared to 54 percent ofbirds and 28 percent of plants.The group's analyses ofother types of insects, while less detailed, suggested similar patterns. Their study involved over 20,000 volunteers who submitted more than 15 million records of species sightings -- an enormous amount of effort to analyze just a few groups of organisms on a relatively small, species-poor island with a well-characterized biota, and a good illustration of why sampling is necessary, and probably always will be.

It's just about inconceivable that the precise status of every species on Earth can be known, and there has to be some point at which reasonable people decide that what is known is enough. Admittedly,what we know are still only scattered details woven into a much grander,and still largely mysterious, tapestry. Many of the largest groups of organisms, and the most unexplored. Tropical moist forests, for example, are thought to contain half the Earth's species,and if that's true only about one in 20 of the species living there have been catalogued.

However, two important pieces of information about these environments are available. First, it's often possible to determine how much of a habitat has been destroyed, by means of forest surveys or satellite photos.

Second, it's known that larger areas ofhabitat can support more species, and by contrast smaller areas contain not only fewer numbers of creatures but fewer species -- a principle called the species-area relation. Specifically,an area of habitat half the size of another area doesn't host half the number of species as the larger area, but about 85 percent. Thus, say Pimm and many other ecologists,the 50 percent oftropical moist forest that's been lost so far is expected to lead to the extinction of 15 percent of tropical moist forest species.

Scientists also use the species-area relation to predict future extinctions as habitat destruction continues. Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, estimates that tropical moist forests will be reduced to about five percent of their original extent by mid-century. According to the species-area rela- tion, that would commit more than half of the species they hold to extinction."If you put that together with habitat destruction in temperate regions,"Raven says,"you come up with something like half to two-thirds of all the species in the world becoming extinct during the course of this century" -- or at least set on an inexorable path to that fate. Callum Roberts, who has been working on similar calculations for coral reefs, reports that "the species-area relationships suggest that marine species will be lost as a consequence of habitat destruction almost as fast as terrestrial species will."

Not all species are equally vulnerable to ecological threats. "It's easier to destroy a species with a small range than a big one," Pimm says, simply because it's easier to wipe out the entire area where it lives. In fact, a large proportion of species have small ranges, and they're not evenly distributed over the planet. For reasons scientists are still debating, they are clumped together in particular spots, most ofwhich are in the tropics. Habitat destruction in those areas could be particularly devastating, as British ecologist Norman Myers has pointed out. Myers pioneered the concept of "biodiversity hotspots," and in 2000, with input from scientists from Conservation International, he defined 25 hotspots covering just 1.4 percent ofthe planet's land area. The hotspots include 15 tropical forests but also places like the Mediterranean basin and the Cape Floristic Region at the southern tip of Africa. Destroying these habitats could wipe out 44 percent ofall plant species, as well as 35 percent of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. In a similar analysis of coral reef environments, which are among the most diverse parts of the sea, Roberts and a group ofcolleagues identified 10 marine biodiversity hotspots, representing just 0.012 percent of the ocean but containing a large proportion of small-range species. Moreover, since that analysis was published in 2002, researchers have been gathering evidence of unexpectedly rich concentrations of biodiversity in other parts ofthe ocean, such as deep-ocean seamounts and cold-water coral reefs, which are being destroyed at a rapid clip by factory trawlers. "The habitats on them are literally being clear-cut as effectively as any forest cutting in the Amazon," Roberts says.

Some scientists have objected to this use of the species-area relation, arguing that it's a tool for predicting the total number of species you'll find in an area if you sample a smaller portion of it -- not for predicting the number of species you'll lose by destroying a portion of habitat. In other words, you can use the equation to make predictions about going from a smaller area to a bigger one, but not from a bigger area to a smaller one.

Yet in several different environments around the world, researchers have found that predictions of species loss based on the species-area relation align pretty well with reality. In the eastern U.S.forests, which were reduced by about 50 percent at their smallest extent (around 1870), the species-area relation predicts a loss of 15 percent of species. In fact, of 28 bird species restricted to the forest, four (or 14.3 percent) had gone extinct and a fifth was critically endangered as of 1995, according to Stuart Pimm and Robert Askins. (One of the extinct species was the ivory-billed woodpecker, so the best-case scenario now stands at three extinct and two critically endangered.) Likewise, in tropical forests such as the Atlantic Forest of Brazil and the island chains of Indonesia and the Philippines, where deforestation is more recent, the species-area relation accurately predicts or underestimates the number of threatened bird species -- an expected result, says Pimm, because in many areas other threats such as invasive species and over-hunting also contribute to species endangerment.

Still, Simberloff says that these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, because the species-area relation is "a very blunt tool." A great deal of habitat loss will surely lead to substantial species loss, but there are many other factors besides area that influence how many species live in a certain place, and the species-area relation doesn't say how fast species will go extinct."All [the analyses] can say is at some point in the future there are going to be fewer species," he emphasizes.

"It's a glass-half-empty/glass-half-full situation," Pimm responds. Even if these analyses don't yield a precise number of species destined for extinction, they do give us a good sense ofthe magnitude ofthe problem. A loss of half to two-thirds of all species, as Peter Raven predicts is possible, puts the present era on par with the five previous mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth. The most recent one, 65 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs along with about two-thirds of all forms of life on land.

While habitat destruction was the focus of most work on global extinction rates throughout the 1990s, recently scientists have begun to consider the biodiversity impacts of climate change. A group of researchers presented perhaps the most comprehensive effort to date to quantify these possible effects in a 2004 paper in Nature.

Led by biologist Chris Thomas (then at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom), the group assessed the present distributions of 1,103 animal and plant species and projected how the habitat available to them would change under conditions predicted by the most commonly used computer model ofclimate change. As the Earth warms, boreal forest is expected to shrink toward the poles, for example, and alpine habitat will retreat up the sides ofmountains.

Reasoning that habitat loss is habitat loss whether it's caused by chainsaws or the greenhouse effect, Thomas's team calculated the proportion of habitat that species are likely to lose as the climate warms, then used the species-area relation to predict the number of extinctions likely to result. They found that, depending on the assumptions ofthe model, 15-37 percent ofthe species would be on their way to extinction by 2050. The paper generated an uproar almost immediately. Daniel Botkin,of the University of California at Santa Barbara, says the analysis makes inappropriate use of the species-area relation and is based on weak underlying data.

"I've shown that we don't even know the area that is boreal forest very well," he says, pointing out that calculating the future loss ofa certain habitat is pretty meaningless when we don't know its present extent.

Yet the gloomy predictions don't depend on the species-area relation, Thomas and his coauthors explained in an online follow-up to their article. The computer model predicted that eight percent of species would have no suitable habitat left at all by 2050. Moreover, warming isn't likely to stop in 2050 -- in fact, the maximum temperature increase predicted for 2050 is pretty close to the minimum increase predicted for 2100. So for species that lose most of their habitat by 2050, "it doesn't take much extrapolation in the mind to realize it's not going to be more than a few decades before they've lost the rest," Thomas says. Although he views the 2004 analysis as only "a first step" to understanding the effects of global warming on biodiversity, Thomas still sees it as a pretty good indicator of the magnitude of extinctions that are likely to result from climate change: "It looks like it's going to be in the tens of percents of species."

How do older predictions ofspecies loss from habitat destruction line up with newer ones about extinction from climate change?

No one has done a formal analysis, and Thomas says no one knows yet how much the two groups of species at risk will overlap. But Pimm reluctantly ventures the conclusion that the losses may prove to be additive, because habitats likely to shrink most as the planet warms, like those on mountaintops and in the polar regions, also tend to be remote and thus relatively unaffected by habitat destruction. "Global warming is going to start knocking of fthe species that we thought might survive,"Pimm says.

Of course, nature is full ofsurprises, and could turn out to be more resilient than we think. Maybe species will be able to adapt to a warmer climate, disperse to newly suitable areas, or hang on in human-altered habitats. The Brazilian maroon-bellied parakeet survives in Rio de Janeiro's city parks and gardens, despite the fact that over 90 percent of its native coastal-forest habitat has been wiped out.

But most ecologists agree that while a few species here and there will be able to make a go of it in a changed world, such species will be part of a small minority. Chris Thomas points out that species trying to adapt to a warmer climate will have to compete with heat-loving species that will arrive from warmer climes. And Stuart Pimm has found that those tropical forest species able to survive in human-altered habitats like cow pastures are relatively widely distributed generalist species that are not at high risk of extinction anyway. In other words, the maroon-bellied parakeet is also a lonely bird, having once been part ofa teeming avian community in the Atlantic Forest; 200 species of birds with which the parakeet shared its lost habitat are on the brink ofextinction.

If there is any real cause for optimism, it lies in the time lag before extinction. If species can hang on for 50 or 100 years, we humans may be able to organize a system of protected areas and alter our own activities to ensure their long-term survival in the wild. The ivory-billed woodpecker was decimated when the mature bottomland forests it depends on were razed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but these forests are now coming back. Ifthe bird has managed to survive for this long, its chances will only be better in the future as the big trees continue to grow. Similarly, Thomas says that if global temperatures peak at a relatively low level sometime late this century and then decline towards pre-industrial levels 150 or 200 years from now, about half of the extinctions predicted by his group's analysis could be avoided.

Perhaps we humans are not yet fated to be lonely.

This article appears in the June/July issue of World Watch.

Sarah DeWeerdt is a Seattle-based science writer specializing in biology and the environment.

George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as an opportunity to expand the conflict into Syria and possibly achieve a long-sought "regime change" in Damascus, but Israel's leadership balked at the scheme, according to Israeli sources.

One Israeli source said Bush's interest in spreading the war to Syria was considered "nuts" by some senior Israeli officials, although Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has generally shared Bush's hard-line strategy against Islamic militants.

After rebuffing Bush's suggestion about attacking Syria, the Israeli government settled on a strategy of mounting a major assault in southern Lebanon aimed at rooting out Hezbollah guerrillas who have been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.

In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post hinted at the Israeli rejection of Bush's suggestion of a wider war in Syria. "Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria," the newspaper reported.

On July 18, Consortiumnews.com reported that the Israel-Lebanon conflict had revived the Bush administration's neoconservative hopes that a new path had opened "to achieve a prized goal that otherwise appeared to be blocked for them -- military assaults on Syria and Iran aimed at crippling those governments."

The article went on to say:

After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 -- after only three weeks of fighting -- the question posed by some Bush administration officials was whether the U.S. military should go "left or right," to Syria or Iran. Some joked that "real men go to Tehran."

According to the neocon strategy, "regime change" in Syria and Iran, in turn, would undermine Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that controls much of southern Lebanon, and would strengthen Israel's hand in dictating peace terms to the Palestinians.

But the emergence of a powerful insurgency in Iraq -- and a worsening situation for U.S. forces in Afghanistan -- stilled the neoconservative dream of making George W. Bush a modern-day Alexander conquering the major cities of the Middle East, one after another.

Bush's invasion of Iraq also unwittingly enhanced the power of Iran's Shiite government by eliminating its chief counterweight, the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein. With Iran's Shiite allies in control of the Iraqi government and a Shiite-led government also in Syria, the region's balance between the two rival Islamic sects was thrown out of whack.

The neocon dream of "regime change" in Syria and Iran never died, however. It stirred when Bush accused Syria of assisting Iraqi insurgents and when he insisted that Iran submit its nuclear research to strict international controls. The border conflict between Israel and Lebanon now has let Bush toughen his rhetoric again against Syria and Iran.

In an unguarded moment during the G-8 summit in Russia on July 17, Bush -- speaking with his mouth full of food and annoyed by suggestions about United Nations peacekeepers -- told British Prime Minister Tony Blair "what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit."

Not realizing that a nearby microphone was turned on, Bush also complained about suggestions for a cease-fire and an international peacekeeping force. "We're not blaming Israel and we're not blaming the Lebanese government," Bush said, suggesting that the blame should fall on others, presumably Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.

Meanwhile, John Bolton, Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, suggested that the United States would only accept a multilateral U.N. force if it had the capacity to take on Hezbollah's backers in Syria and Iran.

"The real problem is Hezbollah," Bolton said. "Would it [a U.N. force] be empowered to deal with countries like Syria and Iran that support Hezbollah?" [NYT, July 18, 2006]

Strategy Meetings

Though the immediate conflict between Israel and Hezbollah was touched off by a Hezbollah cross-border raid on July 12 that captured two Israeli soldiers, the longer-term U.S.-Israeli strategy can be traced back to the May 23, 2006, meetings between Olmert and Bush in Washington.

At those meetings, Olmert discussed with Bush Israel's plans for revising its timetable for setting final border arrangements with the Palestinians, putting those plans on the back burner while moving the Iranian nuclear program to the front burner.

In effect, Olmert informed Bush that 2006 would be the year for stopping Iran's progress toward a nuclear bomb and 2007 would be the year for redrawing Israel's final borders. That schedule fit well with Bush's priorities, which may require some dramatic foreign policy success before the November congressional elections.

At a joint press conference with Bush on May 23, Olmert said "this is a moment of truth" for addressing Iran's alleged ambitions to build a nuclear bomb.

"The Iranian threat is not only a threat to Israel, it is a threat to the stability of the Middle East and the entire world," Olmert said. "The international community cannot tolerate a situation where a regime with a radical ideology and a long tradition of irresponsible conduct becomes a nuclear weapons state."

Olmert also said he was prepared to give the Palestinians some time to accept Israel's conditions for renewed negotiations on West Bank borders, but -- if Palestinian officials didn't comply -- Israel was prepared to act unilaterally.

The prime minister said Israel would "remove most of the [West Bank] settlements which are not part of the major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria. The settlements within the population centers would remain under Israeli control and become part of the state of Israel, as part of the final status agreement."

In other words, Israel would annex some of the most desirable parts of the West Bank regardless of Palestinian objections. That meant the Israelis would need to soften up Hamas, the Islamic militants who won the last Palestinian elections, and their supporters in the Islamic world -- especially Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.

In a speech to a joint session of Congress, Olmert added that the possibility of Iran building a nuclear weapon was "an existential threat" to Israel, meaning that Israel believed its very existence was in danger.

Nuclear Face-Off

Even before the May 23 meetings, Bush was eyeing a confrontation with Iran as part of his revised strategy for remaking the Middle East. Bush was staring down Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over demands Iran back off its nuclear research.

By spring 2006, Bush was reportedly weighing military options for bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. But the President encountered resistance from senior levels of the U.S. military, which feared the consequences, including the harm that might come to more than 130,000 U.S. troops bogged down in neighboring Iraq.

There was also alarm among U.S. generals over the White House resistance to removing tactical nuclear weapons as an option against Iran.

As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, a number of senior U.S. officers were troubled by administration war planners who believed "bunker-busting" tactical nuclear weapons, known as B61-11s, were the only way to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities buried deep underground.

"Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap," a former senior intelligence official told Hersh. "'Decisive' is the key word of the Air Force's planning. It's a tough decision. But we made it in Japan."

This former official said the White House refused to remove the nuclear option from the plans despite objections from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Whenever anybody tries to get it out, they're shouted down," the ex-official said. [New Yorker, April 17, 2006]

By late April, however, the Joint Chiefs finally got the White House to agree that using nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, less than 200 miles south of Tehran, was politically unacceptable, Hersh reported.

"Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning," one former senior intelligence official said.

But -- even without the nuclear option -- senior military officials still worried about a massive bombing campaign against Iran. Hersh wrote:

"Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President's plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran's nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States."

Hersh quoted a retired four-star general as saying, "The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don't want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, 'We stood up.' " [New Yorker, July 10, 2006]

The most immediate concern of U.S. military leaders was that air strikes against Iran could prompt retaliation against American troops in Iraq. U.S. military trainers would be especially vulnerable since they work within Iraqi military and police units dominated by Shiites who are sympathetic to Iran.

Iran also could respond to a bombing campaign by cutting off oil supplies, sending world oil prices soaring and throwing the world economy into chaos.

Israel's Arsenal

While the Joint Chiefs may have had success in getting the White House to remove the use of nuclear weapons from its list of options on Iran, the rising tensions between Israel and Iran may have put the nuclear option back on the table -- since Israel has the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal in the Middle East.

As Hersh reported, "The Israelis have insisted for years that Iran has a clandestine program to build a bomb, and will do so as soon as it can. Israeli officials have emphasized that their 'redline' is the moment Iran masters the nuclear fuel cycle, acquiring the technical ability to produce weapons-grade uranium."

In spring 2006, Iran announced that it had enriched uranium to the 3.6 percent level sufficient for nuclear energy but well below the 90-percent level for making atomic bombs. The U.S. intelligence community believes that Iran is still years and possibly a decade away from the capability of building a nuclear bomb.

Still, Iran's technological advance convinced some Israeli strategists that it was imperative to destroy Iran's program now. Yet to do so, Israel faces the same need for devastating explosive power, thus raising the specter again of using a nuclear bomb.

One interpretation of the Lebanese-Israeli conflict is that Bush and Olmert seized on the Hezbollah raid as a pretext for a pre-planned escalation that will lead to bombing campaigns against Syria and Iran, justified by their backing of Hezbollah.

In that view, Bush found himself stymied by U.S. military objections to targeting Iran's nuclear facilities outside any larger conflict. However, if the bombing of Iran develops as an outgrowth of a tit-for-tat expansion of a war in which Israel's existence is at stake, strikes against Iranian targets would be more palatable to the American public.

The end game would be U.S.-Israeli aerial strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities with the goal of crippling its nuclear program and humiliating Ahmadinejad.

Strangling an Axis

While U.S. officials have been careful not to link the Lebanon conflict to any possible military action against Iran's nuclear facilities, they have spoken privately about using the current conflict to counter growing Iranian influence.

Washington Post foreign policy analyst Robin Wright wrote that U.S. officials told her that "for the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East. ...

"Whatever the outrage on the Arab streets, Washington believes it has strong behind-the-scenes support among key Arab leaders also nervous about the populist militants -- with a tacit agreement that the timing is right to strike.

"'What is out there is concern among conservative Arab allies that there is a hegemonic Persian threat [running] through Damascus, through the southern suburbs of Beirut and to the Palestinians in Hamas,' said a senior U.S. official."

Another school of thought holds that Iran may have encouraged the Hezbollah raid that sparked the Lebanese-Israeli conflict as a way to demonstrate the "asymmetrical warfare" that could be set in motion if the Bush administration attacks Iran.

But Hezbollah's firing of rockets as far as the port city of Haifa, deep inside Israel, has touched off new fears among Israelis and their allies about the danger of more powerful missiles carrying unconventional warheads, possibly hitting heavily populated areas, such as Tel Aviv.

That fear of missile attacks by Islamic extremists dedicated to Israel's destruction has caused Israel to start "dusting off it nukes," one source told me.

Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."

If we do not look beyond the carnage of the last few weeks, weigh the reaction of others in and outside the region, and reflect on Washington's role in precipitating the violence, I fear there will be no exit. A brief review may be instructive. Who led our march into this modern-day Valley of Death?

Ideologues and Amateurs

Let's begin with the new people and policies that President George W. Bush brought in with him when he took office on Jan. 20, 2001. Who urged on him what Michael O'Hanlon of Brookings calls "the huge mistake of giving Israel a blank check?" Who played the leading roles in encouraging Bush to let slip the dogs of war on Iraq?

Honors for the leading role in the category of fiasco goes, ex aequo, to Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld-the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" described by Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.). At an award ceremony, the cabal no doubt would offer copious thanks to other key actors-first and foremost, to ideologues Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. The Oscar for best actress in a supporting role goes to Condoleezza Rice.

It was five and a half years ago that Rice was formally initiated into the neo-conservative brotherhood as an auxiliary. Her most important service was greasing the skids for the brothers to try to shoehorn into reality their ambitious but naive dreams of using "preemptive" war to ensure total US/Israeli domination of the Middle East. At the new administration's first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001, then-national security adviser Rice stage-managed formal approval of two profound changes in decades-long US policy toward Israel-Palestine and Iraq. Thanks to Paul O'Neill, confirmed as Treasury Secretary just hours before the NSC meeting, we have a first-hand account.

The neoconservatives had already gotten to the new president, for he began with the abrupt announcement that he was ditching the policy of past presidents who tried to honest-broker an end to the violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Rather, the president declared that the US would tilt sharply toward Israel. Most important, Bush made it clear that he would let then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon resolve the conflict as he saw fit. The US would no longer "interfere."

Powell: Dead Man Walking

O'Neill described Secretary of State Colin Powell as "startled" at hearing this. Powell warned that US disengagement would unleash Sharon and the Israeli army. But Bush shrugged dismissively, adding, "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things." Just seven weeks later with Sharon in Washington, the president again shocked those present when, out of the blue, he turned to him and said, "I'll use force to protect Israel," according to Sheryl Gay Stolberg writing in today's New York Times.

After his requiem for the decades of US sweat and blood expended on the effort to work out a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the president turned immediately to Iraq. Rice led off by reciting the received wisdom of the neocons (I still wonder how many of them actually believed it) that "Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region." Whereupon, at her request, then-CIA director George Tenet displayed a grainy overhead image of a factory in Iraq that he just happened to have with him. Tenet thought the factory "might" be associated with a chemical or biological weapons program, but no such association could be confirmed. No problem. The conversation immediately turned from this typically Tenet-ative "intelligence" to the question of which Iraqi targets to begin bombing. Remember: this watershed meeting of the NSC took place more than eight months before 9/11 and more than two years before the invasion of Iraq.

O'Neill, just inducted into the cabinet but not into the neoconservative brotherhood, was understandably nonplussed. He says he found it all quite curious and left the NSC meeting convinced that, for reasons never fully explained, "getting Hussein was now the administration's focus."

The twin decision to (1) "tilt" more decidedly toward Israel and (2) prepare to attack Iraq-were right out of a blueprint drafted in 1996 by a small group of Americans and Israelis, including arch-neoconservatives Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Shortly after the Jan. 30 NSC meeting the two were given influential posts in the Department of Defense directly under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz-Perle as chair of the powerful Defense Policy Board, and Feith as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (#3 in the Defense hierarchy). The policy-prescriptive blueprint, titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing the Realm, had been prepared originally for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, but its recommendations proved to be too extreme even for him. No matter. As the new Bush administration took shape, Perle and Feith retrieved the mothballed study, made an end-run around the hapless Powell, and sold it to Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush.

Dr. Rice Becomes Dr. No

There is a certain poetic justice in the fact that Rice, now secretary of state, is reaping the whirlwind. She has been trapped in the extremely awkward position of having to say "No" to a ceasefire, causing the biggest PR disaster since Abu Graib. And she still managed a smile when the Israelis, adding insult to injury, mocked her by openly violating the limited cease-fire they had promised. One might think that, no matter how many times the president may tell her "Attagirl," Rice might feel thoroughly used, mocked, and humiliated.

Not so. Still an innocent abroad, Rice has cheerfully played piano accompaniment for the neocon hit song "Reshaping the Entire Region," and has dutifully adhered to the neocon script in describing the violence in Lebanon and Israel as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East." On Friday, President Bush added this stanza: "This is a moment of intense conflict...yet our aim is to turn it into a moment of opportunity and a chance for broader change in the region."

Bush's text elicited uncharacteristically acerbic ridicule from Richard Haass, who served under Bush as head of policy planning at the State Department. (Yes, this is the same Haas who in July 2002 begged Rice for an appointment with the president, whom he wanted to warn of the folly of invading Iraq. Rice reportedly told him, "The decision's been made; don't waste your breath.") Referring to Bush's remarks on Friday, Haass, now head of the Council on Foreign Relations, laughed at the president's optimism, according to a report by Peter Baker in Monday's Washington Post. "That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time," said Haass. "If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"

It is far from funny. Rather, it is amateur hour again at the White House, with Rice acting as the president's personal secretary under instruction to do what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neocons tell her to do. The results have been entirely predictable. Seldom before has Washington been so widely seen to be joined at the hip to an Israel on the rampage. Seldom has US stock in the region sunk to such depths as it did last week, with civilian casualties in Lebanon piling up (literally) and with Rice continuing to join Israel in rejecting appeals for an immediate ceasefire on grounds it must be "sustainable." Policy and performance alike have been myopic in the extreme, and have resulted in an embarrassing US setback from which it will take decades to recover. The ramifications are region-wide; but looking at Lebanon alone, one of my former CIA colleagues observed:

"The irony in all this is that Israel has an interest in a multicultural Lebanon and not an Islamist Lebanon, and the high hopes for the former are being dashed."

Meanwhile Back in Baghdad-More "Last Throes"

In terms of those killed, Iraq was even more violent than Lebanon over the past week, but Western media put Iraqi developments on the back burner.

On July 25, President Bush told the press, "Obviously, the violence in Baghdad is still terrible, and therefore there needs to be more troops." Bush observed that "Conditions change inside a country. And the question is: Are we going to be facile enough (sic) to change with [them]." Some 4,000 US troops are being sent from elsewhere in Iraq to reinforce Baghdad. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R, NE) noted on July 28 that this "reverses last month's decision to have Iraqi forces take the lead in Baghdad...and represents a dramatic setback for the US and the Iraqi government." Highly respected military analyst Anthony Cordesman has expressed the same view.

--Secretary Rumsfeld approved Gen. George Casey's request to extend the Iraq tour of a 3,700-strong Stryker brigade, which had been scheduled to return to the US this summer, and the Pentagon announced that the number of US troops in Iraq rose last week to 132,000-the highest level since May. In a command performance in June, Gen. Casey reportedly gave Bush a plan for withdrawing 7,000 troops before the mid-term elections-a plan that probably will be overtaken by events.

--Whether he intended to or not while fielding questions from the press, national security adviser Stephen Hadley, virtually redefined the mission of US troops. Addressing what he called the "new challenge," Hadley said, "This isn't about insurgency. This isn't about terror. This is about sectarian violence." The number of sectarian killings has doubled since the start of the year. Press reports indicate that many Sunnis are even afraid to go out to retrieve the bodies of relatives in Baghdad's overflowing morgues, lest they too become prey to Shia militia. The very large unanswered question: Is that why our troops lie exposed in the middle-to stop Iraqis from killing one another?

--Richard Armitage, who was Secretary Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department, warned of the danger that bringing in more troops at this late stage may prove to be "too little too late, and that the US will turn into a bystander in an Iraqi civil war it does not have sufficient resources to prevent." Western press reports suggest that this is already the case-with virtually everyone below the rank of general admitting that inadequate troop strength remains a major problem. At the same time, it is universally recognized that requesting more troops would sound the death knell for one's career.

--One important Shia leader has objected to the deployment of additional US forces to Baghdad, and Shia militias are increasingly clashing with US troops. The Shia militias are also using more effective, armor-piercing IEDs. US officers have expressed concern over what the Shia might do in reaction to the US green light for Israeli attacks on Lebanon. And Col. Patrick Lang (USA, ret.) has expressed grave concern over the vulnerability of US supply lines from Kuwait into the Iraqi heartland, and Iran's ability to stir up the Shia in that area.

--Former adviser to the US occupation authority in Iraq, Michael Rubin, now with the American Enterprise Institute has said, "The Shia-led Interior Ministry is out of control." And there is a strong move afoot in the Iraqi Parliament to replace the interior minister.

Otherwise, everything is going just fine-or so the Bush administration and FOX News Channel would have us believe. It has become increasingly difficult to put a positive spin on all this. Now and again, out of desperation, a PR person will reach for the all-too-familiar chestnut, "We have not once been defeated in battle."

Many years ago, Army Col. Harry Summers learned the hard way not to use this one. At the end of the war in Vietnam, Summers received orders to negotiate with North Vietnamese Army Col. Tu the terms of the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam. Summers could not resist reminding Tu, "You know you never beat us on the battlefield." Col. Tu paused for a moment; "That may be so," he said, "but it is also irrelevant."

Thirty-three months have gone by since we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) branded this war "unwinnable." The word has now been banned from use by "patriotic" folks here in Washington; not even my Microsoft Word dictionary recognizes it.

Our early conclusion on the war required no rocket science-just a modicum of experience in guerrilla warfare and Vietnam. It is now time for all of us Americans who care about justice, sanity, and peace to draw the appropriate conclusions and summon the courage to stick our necks out, in whatever way we can, to stop the madness. It is time, in other words, to walk the talk.

For it is simply not right to ask "volunteer" troops from the inner cities and farms of this nation not only to play referee between armed Iraqi factions, but also to "stay the course" for us-out of the forlorn hope they might just get lucky and succeed in "reshaping the entire region."

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.