The conference is expected to bring together leading politicians from the majority Shia Muslim community as well as from the Sunni, Kurd and even Christian minorities in an attempt to halt the country's slide into anarchy.

The powerful Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who supports the prime minister, is backing the conference and Mr Maliki's call for an end to the violence.

But the two main Shia groups, Mr Sadr's Mahdi army and the Badr organisation of Ali Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, are locked in a power struggle for leadership of the Shias.

Reports say the goal is to prepare the ground for a follow-up conference outside Iraq with insurgent leaders themselves. As part of the national reconciliation programme, Mr Maliki is said to be considering a general amnesty for all Iraqis willing to lay down their arms and renounce violence.

However, the offer excludes non-Iraqi nationals involved in the fighting in Iraq, notably Abu-Ayeeb al-Masri, who replaced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as head of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Proposals for an amnesty are controversial as they are likely to draw protests from relatives of victims of suicide bombs and killings - not least in the US, where the Bush administration is likely to face bitter charges of letting the deaths of service personnel go unpunished.

Next week's reconciliation conference has been postponed twice already. Most recently set for October 21, the meeting was put off indefinitely, with the government citing waves of sectarian violence as the reason.

The depth of Iraq's carnage was highlighted in a UN report yesterday that said some 7,054 civilians hads died in September and October. The death toll in October reached the highest monthly total since the US led-invasion in 2003.

Under pressure from the Bush administration, Mr Maliki fixed a new date. A special adviser in Baghdad to the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has been involved in the conference arrangements.

Mr Maliki will also be meeting George Bush next week, when the US president stops over in Amman, in Jordan, on his way home from a trade summit in Vietnam.

Mr Maliki will be seeing Mr Bush for the first time since the Republicans lost control of Congress to the Democrats in the midterm elections. The Democrats are putting pressure on the White House for a phased withdrawal of the 140,000 US troops in Iraq.

There have been signs of friction between the Iraqi prime minister and the White House, which has been urging Mr Maliki to take stronger action to rein in Shia militias that have infiltrated the security forces, and to redouble efforts at national reconciliation.

The British government yesterday gave the clearest timetable yet for a significant withdrawal of its 7,200 troops. The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said she was confident Iraqi forces could take over security from British forces in southern Iraq in the spring.

As the Iraqi government finalises preparations for a national reconciliation conference, regional efforts to contain Iraq's violence are picking up steam.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, has invited his Iraqi counterpart, the Kurd Jalal Talabani, and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, for a summit in Tehran this weekend.

If those are the choices, I'll take losing any day... well, as a believer in non-violence, I'd rather that we lost and surrendered before we invaded, but that's just me. And upfront, since I've made my pacifist disclosure, leave your PC blinders at the door before reading this, becuase the arguments here only bolster the idea that there's no way to win this. The crazy idea that Democrats like Rahm Emanuel support, such as adding 20,000 troops temporarily, looks only more insane in light of this analysis.

Brecher makes this case because he says that US forces as they are presently organized are essentially obsolete against the kind of war they are facing in Iraq:

[W]e're living through one of those moments in military history where a powerful, successful military model runs into its limitations. The military-industrial steamroller that won WW II for us and the Soviets was a glorious thing, but then so was the phalanx, and the medieval heavy cavalry, and the British square. They all hit a wall eventually, and so have we. ... [W]hat we've got now is a huge gap between the military force a superpower has and what it's actually ready to use. We've got a problem in the Sunni Triangle, and we're fighting it with mid-20th century weapons, armor and cannon and air strikes. Sure, it's much better armor, cannon and air support than we had in 1944, but we're talking little refinements of old weapons. Cannon have been around for 600 years, people! A 25mm chain cannon is just a much smaller, faster, more accurate version of the humongous, sloppy tubes that blasted the walls of Constantinople in 1453.

What is a modern day war-monger to do?

Well one one hand there's our monster arsenal of nukes, chemical weapons and biological weapons. But we won't use those of course as a matter of holding on to our shreds of principle.

Then there's this counterinsurgency technique -- backing weaker factions against stronger ones to force a massive endless bloody war. It's the only CI technique left over because that 'hearts and minds' crap we heard about years ago doesn't apply to Iraq:

Other examples of successful CI, like the Brits against Chinese commies in Malaysia in the 1950s, are a lot more like El Salvador than Baghdad: small groups (ethnic Chinese in Malay territory) with nothing but an ideology to keep up their morale. Ideology, compared to tribal loyalties like we're facing in Iraq, is weak stuff, soymilk compared to Jagermeister. Commies didn't strap on suicide vests like the Jihadis do. We're up against a clan, a big old clan that will fight to the last dummy. Taking out the leadership just won't do it.

So that leaves:

Giving the insurgency enough rope to hang itself with an endless civil war. I wish I had time to go into details, but basically what you do is identify the weak element among the insurgent leadership, strengthen it vs. the hardliners (and here's where having a good assassination squad or two can help, by wiping out the most effective hardline commanders) and then force the weak faction to sign a treaty with you.

It's a sure thing that the hardliners won't accept the deal, but it's just as sure the moderates won't give up power, because (a) they like it, and (b) they don't want to be tortured to death along with their entire families. So booya! You've got a nice civil war going between what used to be comrades in insurgency, and you can play one faction against the other, keeping them both weak. You can't stay in open power as the foreign occupier, but you can take a terrible revenge, because this kind of war is one long massacre, neighbor vs. neighbor.

This has been tried before -- by the Brits in Ireland, Brecher explains, and by the Israelis in Palestine:

The Israelis tried to do exactly the same thing by ceding Gaza and bits of the West Bank to the PLO. They had Hamas waiting, way tougher and younger than Fatah, and hoped the Pals would duke it out - the old, weak Arafat cronies vs. the bloods from Hamas. The reason they knew Hamas was in the mood to go to the mattress is that it was the Israeli secret services that created Hamas in the first place, as a "counterweight" to the quasi-commie PLO. Hamas was going to be the dumb Islamic faction that would harass the PLO into ineffectiveness, as if the PLO ever needed any help getting there. Well, it worked a little too well. Two intifadas and one Hamas leadership later, the Israelis would give anything to have a pitiful coward pol like Arafat back in charge, instead of these crazy Hamas guys with 17 children each and a bad case of martyr-envy.

See, that's the problem: you set up two insurgent factions at each other's throats and you're likely to be running a tournament, with the meanest and most determined bastards winning. And that's not who you want for neighbors. The Israelis had some early successes sparking feuds between Palestinian factions. ... The hard part, and the part where the Israelis lost their nerve, is staying out of the way long enough to let the puppet government you've set up get strong enough to take on the hardliners in a really big, bloody civil war. ... The Israelis couldn't stay out of the little Palestinian pockets they'd handed over to the PLO, because some Hamas or Islamic Jihad kid would blow himself up in a Tel Aviv deli and the public would demand that the IAF go blast some Pal refugee camp. It made the public happy, but then the public, any public, is a moron. And in the long run, it meant that the Pals never stopped having some new Israeli raid to be mad about, so they couldn't get around to the next step of hating each other enough to get a decent civil war going.

But in the final conclusion, Brecher doubts that this could even apply in Iraq because you need centralized leadership, and what we have in Iraq is utterly without formal direction:

Nobody runs the insurgency, and nobody really runs the Shia militias either, not at national level. Sadr? He's their poster boy as long as he mouths off the way the hardliners want, but he'll go the way of Sistani if he tries to curb the boys' enthusiasm. They don't need help. They're having the time of their lives. It's not so much fun for the other focus groups, like women and men over 25 but for Iraqi boys from 15-25, these are the Wonder Years. The key measurement for insurgencies in all these strategies is leadership, ranging from the almost Inca-style pyramid structure of the VC/NVA to total chaos. The steeper the pyramid, the more room you have to play with CI options, especially the ones involving negotiation. The more chaotic and localized the insurgents, the more you start thinking about those nice, clean red diameter-circles you get with our old friends the nukes.

And we'd never do that, would we?

Jan Frel is AlterNet's senior editor.

The bullet-riddled bodies were bound and blindfolded, showing signs of torture, he said, adding the Iraqi police had transformed all the bodies to the morgue.

The almost daily gruesome bodies' findings, assassinations and explosions in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities were seen as a major setback for the Iraqi government's efforts to stem violence and achieve national reconciliation.

More than 3,700 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest death toll in a single month since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) said in a report on Wednesday.

Angry residents and armed militiamen flooded the streets hurling curses at Sunni Muslims, AP reported.

The situation was fluid and police had different numbers for those killed and wounded. But Health Minister Ali Shummari said the death toll is now 144 and 206 were wounded. He said there were six car bombs and a missile fired.

The attacks were part of a spasm of violence on Thursday that shook two Baghdad bastions of support for Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- the Sadr City slum in the Iraqi capital's northeast, and the Health Ministry compound, controlled by the cleric's political movement.

At least 30 gunmen thought to be from a Sunni neighborhood attacked the Health Ministry, police said.

Al-Sadr's movement controls the ministry, and U.S. military commanders suspect the al-Sadr group is at the center of sectarian fighting in the Iraqi capital over the past year.

There were no immediate details about casualties at the ministry compound, which is in central Baghdad's Bab al-Mudham area.

At least three mortar rounds landed inside the compound, police said, and the gunmen tried to break into it and fought with ministry security guards.

A Health Ministry official said the attackers came from the nearby Sunni neighborhood of Fadhel and that they also struck the Shiite Endowment, which manages Shiite institutions around the country.

Raids continue in hunt for kidnapped soldier

In a separate incident, police said U.S. forces killed four people Thursday when they opened fire on a minibus in Sadr City.

The U.S. military later said Iraqi troops fired at a vehicle that posed an "immediate threat" in Sadr City when they were looking for an insurgent who apparently knows the whereabouts of a U.S. soldier kidnapped last month.

The action came during a raid, one of several in the area since Spc. Ahmed K. Altaie disappeared October 23 in Baghdad.

Four civilians also were wounded in the incident, which occurred on Fallah Street, a busy thoroughfare, the Baghdad police official said. The U.S. military said there were no Iraqi military or coalition casualties. Iraqi forces detained five suspected cell members.

The bomb attacks in Sadr City came a day after a U.N. report about Iraq that underscored the unbridled sectarian violence in Iraq. The report said that 3,709 civilians were killed in violence in Iraq in October -- the highest monthly toll since the war began. (Full story)

Other developments

On Wednesday, three U.S. Marines died of "wounds sustained due to enemy action" in Anbar province, the volatile region west of the capital, a U.S. military statement released Thursday said. The American military death toll in Iraq is 2,872, including seven civilian contractors of the military. There have been 52 troop deaths during November.

Also Wednesday, U.S.-led coalition forces killed a "terrorist and detained two suspected terrorists" during a raid in Balad targeting an associate of a senior al Qaeda in Iraq leader, the U.S. military said. Balad is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Baghdad in Salaheddin province.

Dick Cheney's office in Washington denied reports the vice president was in Baghdad on Thursday. Iraqi state television earlier had reported that Cheney was in the capital on an unannounced visit. The vice president is set to travel to Saudi Arabia on Friday for talks.

Second, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice personally appealed to the Gulf Cooperation Council in October to serve as intermediaries between the US and armed Sunni resistance groups [not including al Qaeda], communicating a US willingness to negotiate with them at any time or place. Speaking in early October, Rice joked that if then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "heard me now, he would wage a war on me fiercer and hotter than he waged on Iraq", according to an Arab diplomat privy to the closed session.

Third, there was an "unprecedented" secret meeting of high-level Americans and representatives of "a primary component of the Iraqi resistance" two weeks ago, lasting for three days. As a result, the Iraqis agreed to return to the talks in the next two weeks with a response for the American side, according to Jordanian press leaks and al-Quds al-Arabi.

Fourth, detailed email transmissions dated November 16 reveal an active American effort behind the scenes to broker a peace agreement with Iraqi resistance leaders, a plot that could include a political coup against Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Fifth, Bush security adviser Stephen Hadley carried a six-point message for Iraqi officials on his recent trip to Baghdad: include Iraqi resistance and opposition leaders in any initiative towards national reconciliation;general amnesty for the armed resistance fighters;
dissolve the Iraqi commission charged with banning the Baath Party; start the disbanding of militias and death squads;
cancel any federalism proposal to divide Iraq into three regions, and combine central authority for the central government with greater self-rule for local governors; distribute oil revenues in a fair manner to all Iraqis, including the Sunnis whose regions lack the resource.

Prime Minister Al-Maliki was unable to accept the American proposals because of his institutional allegiance to Shiite parties who believe their historic moment has arrived after one thousand years of Sunni domination. That Shiite refusal has accelerated secret American efforts to pressure, re-organize, or remove the elected al-Maliki regime from power.

The Back Story

Underlying these developments are three American concerns: first, the deepening quagmire and sectarian strife on the battlefield; second, the mid-year American elections in which voters repudiated the war; and third, the strategic concern that the new Iraq has slipped into the orbit of Iran. It remains to be seen if Iran will exercise influence on its Shiite allies in Iraq{the Grand Ayatollah Sistani was born in Iraq, and the main Shiite bloc was created in Iran by Iraqi exiles]. But that is the direction being taken by Baker's Iraq Study Group and former CIA director John Deutch in a New York Times editorial. The principal US track, in addition to a declared withdrawal plan, should be to work towards a hands-off policy by Iran, at least for an interval, according to Deutch.

This possible endgame has been in the making for some time. Even two years ago, US officials were probing contacts with Iraqi resistance groups distinct from al-Qaeda. Recent polls indicate sixty percent Iraqi support for armed resistance against the United States, while approximately eighty percent of Iraqis support some timetable for withdrawal, an indispensable indicator for Iraqi insurgents laying down some arms.

Even before the 2003 US invasion, peace groups like Global Exchange and the newly-forming Code Pink sent delegations to create people-to-people relations with Iraqi opponents of the occupation and members of civil society. This writer met with Iraqi exiles in London, who suggested further meetings in Amman. Those contacts were facilitated in 2005 by a former Jordanian diplomat, Munther Haddadin, who supported open-ended discussions with Iraqis in exile, Jordan's Crown Prince Hassan, and with intermediaries from the insurgency who made the dangerous 15-hour drive from Baghdad to Amman on more than one occasion. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Rob Collier, also interviewed Iraqi insurgents and was helpful in providing contacts. Earlier this year, an American peace delegation, including Cindy Sheehan, found themselves in two days of meetings with Iraqis of every political stripe. US Congressman Jim McDermott [D-Washington] was crucial in making these contracts possible. Dal Lamagna, a self-described "frustrated peacemaker" made both trips to Amman, and provided this writer with videos and transcripts of the interviews on which this article is based.

It must be emphasized that there is no reason to believe that these US gestures are anything more than probes, in the historic spirit of divide-and-conquer, before escalating the Iraq war in a Baghdad offensive. Denial plausibility - aka Machiavellian secrecy - remains American security policy, for understandable if undemocratic reasons.

Yet Americans who voted in the November election because of a deep belief that a change of government in Washington might end the war have a right to know that their votes counted. The US has not abandoned its entire strategy in Iraq, but is offering significant concessions without its own citizens knowing. #

Tom Hayden was a leader of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era. He has enlisted as a chronicler of the government's plans for Iraq, and a self-appointed internet strategist for the anti-war movement since 2003. He can be contacted at www.tomhayden.com