"The nature of the mission in Iraq is unfamiliar and dangerous, and the United States has had great difficulty filling civilian assignments in Iraq with sufficient numbers of properly trained personnel at the appropriate rank," wrote members of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State James A. Baker II and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., in their report. For example, panel members said, the United States still has "far too few Arab language-proficient" officials in the country.

To address the problem, the group recommended that the secretaries of State and Defense and the Director of National Intelligence put the "highest possible priority" on language and cultural training for military personnel and civilian employees about to be assigned to Iraq. And, the report said, if not enough of the latter group volunteer to go to the country, "civilian agencies must fill those positions with directed assignments."

If agencies do so, the panel recommended, the federal government should take steps to address employees' financial hardships resulting from service in Iraq, such as providing the same tax breaks military personnel stationed in the country receive.

The Iraq Study Group, launched earlier this year under the auspices of the United States Institute of Peace, also recommended that the Defense, Justice, State and Treasury departments, along with the U.S. Agency for International Development, begin to conduct cross-agency training efforts to prepare for complex operations such as those in Iraq. Those efforts, the group said, should be modeled on the joint training exercises conducted by the military services since the passage of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act.

In a separate recommendation, the panel said the State Department should create a Foreign Service Reserve Corps with personnel who could provide "surge capacity" to deal with future stability operations. Other departments, such as Agriculture, Justice and Treasury, should develop similar capacities, panel members said

Did you notice something about the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report? It recommends all sorts of changes, all of them far short of actually ending the war, but it recommends them all to the same person responsible for the disastrous situation we're in now. It doesn't suggest what Congress should do to rein in an out-of-control president. Rather, it recommends that the President do dozens of things. Here's one of them:

Recommendation 22: The President should state that the United States does not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. If the Iraqi government were to request a temporary base or bases, then the U.S. government could consider that request as it would in the case of any other government.

Bush came close to stating this on April 13, 2004, when he said "As a proud and independent people, Iraqis do not support an indefinite occupation and neither does America." But the Iraq Study Group does, and so -- judging by other remarks and actions, does Bush. When you refuse to set a definite time for getting out, you are supporting an indefinite occupation. Robert Gates, the new Rumsfeld, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that he thought the "war on terror," which he dishonestly connected to the War on Iraq, would last "a generation." That's pretty indefinite.

But what if Bush were to state that the United States does not seek permanent bases? How would that differ from Bush stating that he had no warning of Katrina, or that he knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or that the United States does not torture, or that he planned to keep Rumsfeld on another two years?

Speaking of Rumsfeld, on February 17, 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, testifying before the same Senate Armed Services Committee, said: ''We have no intention, at the present time, of putting permanent bases in Iraq.'' Now, in Rumsfeldspeak this probably meant that he would build temporary bases and then decide later to make them permanent, or that they would just be "enduring," which would mean permanent but not, you know, permanent -- in the same way that an "enemy combatant" is a prisoner of war without the rights of, you know, a prisoner of war. In any case, what is gained by having Bush or Rumsfeld say the words? Wouldn't it make more sense to recommend to Congress that it do something that used to be the role of Congress: namely, pass a law?

But there's the catch. Congress already has. Since the moment we entered Fiscal Year 2007 in October, every dime spent on permanent military bases in Iraq has been illegal. But no one even knows how to find out how many dimes that is. And that illustrates a broader problem. Bush not only began this war in secret with money that Congress had approved for something else, but he also immediately turned it into a permanent occupation and began constructing permanent bases. It took Congress three years to get around to cutting off the funding for more such construction, but Congress had never approved the whole idea. Neither, of course, had the Iraqis.

This past weekend there was a huge protest in Italy where a permanent U.S. military base plans to expand with the construction of a new base nearby. In South Korea it's a similar story, with the added kicker that our military is evicting townspeople, eliminating their village, and building a new base with a golf course attached. There's a global meeting planned in March in Ecuador on eliminating foreign military bases. It was U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia that enraged Osama Bin Laden. Americans pay a fortune to maintain bases all over the world, and the primary product of them is anger.

Last March, when Congress passed the "emergency" supplemental funding for the war for 2006, both houses of Congress included language banning the use of funds to build permanent bases. A Republican-run conference committee "reconciled" this agreement by deleting it.

But leaders on this issue like Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) didn't give up. Similar language was included in the "Defense" Appropriations bill for 2007. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) introduced an amendment on the floor of the House to again delete the language on no-permanent-bases. But most of the Republicans and almost all of the Democrats went against him. Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) urged King to withdraw his amendment: "If we strike this prohibition from this bill that was well thought out, what we are saying to the Iraqi people and what I am satisfied the propaganda machine of al Qaeda in Iraq are going to do is use this and say: see there, we told you so. The Americans plan to occupy us for the rest of our lives." The House voted 376-50 for no-permanent-bases. It's been the law since October. The 2007 "Defense" Authorization bill passed including the same language.

Why did King want to allow the construction of permanent bases? He argued on the floor: "I believe that we should not foreclose our options in Iraq ... Historically, basing rights agreements have been a necessary part of diplomatic relations with foreign governments." Well, yes, but that's exactly what the Iraq Study Group recommends: working the basing arrangements out with the puppet government. Indications are that the Iraqis are not fooled.

When a number of us wrote to Congressional leaders to thank them for cutting off funds for permanent bases, we noted that: "This important step comes as evidence increasingly points to its need. A University of Maryland poll recently showed that 77 percent of Iraqis believe that the United States intends to maintain permanent bases in that country, while a State Department study found that a majority of Iraqis are calling for U.S-led military forces to withdraw immediately. The recently issued National Intelligence Estimate confirmed what many of us had feared for so long: the U.S. presence in Iraq is increasing terrorist threats and not making America's homeland more secure."

So, over three-quarters of Iraqis are hip to what we're doing. Americans don't lag so far behind. In a new study released by the same university this week, we learn that 66 percent of Americans (including a near majority of Republicans) believe that a majority of Iraqis oppose the establishment of permanent U.S. bases in their country, and 68 percent of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) believe that, in any case, we should not have such bases. Tom Engelhardt points out that: "This is an especially remarkable set of figures, given that the permanent bases have received next to no attention in the American mainstream media."

Enough has been reported, however, for us to know that we are spending billions of dollars to construct bases in Iraq for the U.S. military. The new Democratic majority in Congress knows this, knows the damage these bases are doing, and knows the good that could be done by making better use of all that money, not to mention the lives lost in the process. If we speak up, perhaps the new majority will also know how quickly it can become a minority again if it does not seize this issue, expose it, and set it right. As Congressman Dennis Kucinich said on the floor of the House on Wednesday: "The American public did not vote for the Iraq Study Group. They voted for a new congress and a new direction in Iraq -- out."

It's a "new plan," a plan to "beef up Iraqi military" so it can take over from US forces. You heard Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki last week claim that the only reason his forces have not stood up to the insurgents so far is because they don't have any "heavy weapons." He wants heavy weapons -- tanks, Humvees, artillery, that kind of stuff.

Maliki's request fell on eager -- no, desperate -- ears. George W. Bush, now painted into a corner by his own incompetence, is now looking for any way to hold off Iraq's inevitably collapse until after he leaves office. And Maliki's request for more military gear was just the ticket, especially now that the Baker/Hamilton has sanctified the notion of encouraging and enabling the Iraqis to fight for themselves.

Of course, Iraq can't even pay it's own utility bills, so guess who's going to have to borrow a few billion dollars more to pay for those heavy weapons Maliki wants?

Bush's new strategy, which has already begun to emerge, will be a two-pronged ruse: 1) Increase training of Iraqi troops, and 2) Provide them "the means" to function after US forces leave. ("Means" = heavy weapons.)

Bear with me here as I free associate on this "new course forward:"

Let's see -- first let's talk about "heavy weapons."

Over the past three years the harsh Iraq environment has worn down our own military's stock of heavy weapons to the breaking point. Nearly $8 billion in US heavy weapons, tanks, trucks, Humvees and trucks, are now up on blocks awaiting repairs at US headquarter and supply depots around the world. Our soldiers in Iraq are now so short heavy equipment that the Pentagon has been looting National Guard and Reserve units to make up the shortfall. Gutted reserve units now need their own $7 billion infusion of heavy weapons to replace theirs which are now being degraded in Iraq.

So, just what can we give Mr. Maliki? The heavy weapons and gear now on the ground in Iraq, of course. We could just leave it behind when our own troops split. Forget for moment that we will have to then replace it all for our own armed forces. Let's instead consider what the Iraqis will do with those heavy weapons.

Well let's see. Maliki is a Shiite. So is that little two-legged tumor, al-Sadar. Shiites are to Iraq what racist segregationists were to the US south a century ago -- only meaner. Sunnis are Iraq's minority. What does common sense suggest the Shiite-government of Iraq has in mind for those heavy weapons. (You only get one guess.)

Which is precisely why, at such as critical tipping-point moment, al-Maliki is not begging for more US troops. And he's not begging US troops to stay in Iraq either. All Maliki is asking for now are "heavy weapons" for his 350,000 US-trained and supplied Iraqi soldiers.

On top of that al-Sadar has his own 60,000-man Shia militia. These are the folks who have been kidnapping Sunnis off the street. Most are later found shot in the head, but only after militia soldiers amused themselves by making holes in them with electric drills. (Imagine the creative uses those dudes will come up with once they have heavy weapons!)

Meanwhile up north the Kurds, who have been stabbed in the back by the US more than once, will go berserk at the very notion that the US is providing the Shiites the heavy military gear. That's all the Shiites need to reclaim the Kurd's newly acquired oil fields -- which of course is another reason al-Maliki wants heavy equipment.

I guess my point here is Bush is about to make things worse in Iraq -- again. We should not give Maliki "heavy" anything. We've already armed and trained his new army with the kinds of weapons necessary to bring law and order to Iraq. I suggest he be told to get on with that task because that's all he's getting from Uncle Sap. (Thank goodness it takes too long to train helicopter pilots or we'd be giving them choppers too.)

New York Times -- and one-time supporter of the war -- Tom Friedman, said today that the trouble real problem we face in Iraq is that Iraqis living together as a unified nation is our first choice. But for Iraqis that is their second choice. Most Iraqis first choice is that their particular tribe, Sunni, Shia or Kurd, get everything they want. (Which for Sunnis and Shiites is, pretty much, everything.) The Shiites want full control of Iraq. The Sunnis want to return to the good old days when they ran roughshod over Iraq. The Kurds want nothing to do with either of them, just their own country and every drop of oil under it.

"We lost," Friedman, said today. "It's over. We should no longer sacrifice our first-choice soldiers to further the second choices of the Iraqis."

Amen. Get out. Sooner rather than later. And take our heavy weapons with us.

A couple of other free-associative observations on all this:

* We all know now that the Bush administration lied to us about WMD in Iraq. Now, thanks to the Baker/Hamilton report we learn they've been lying to us about the true level of violence in Iraq. They looked at one particularly violent day in Iraq during which the administration reported 93 violent incidents. The real number was over 1100 violent attacks. (Not exactly a rounding error.)

* Ever wonder why, from the very start of this mess, the Bush administration made one breathtaking mistake after another? There was a clue in the Baker/Hamilton report. We have 1000 Americans working at the US embassy in Iraq out of which only six of them speak Arabic. There's 4 million Arab-Americans, but the Bush administration could only round up 6 (s-i-x) to work at our embassy in Baghdad.

* On 9/11 3030 Americans were killed, resulting in the Bush administration's "war on terror." The same year the leading causes of death for Americans was tobacco -- the source of 435,000 deaths, or 18.1% of total US deaths that year. Rather than declare war on tobacco Bush administration lawyers argued the court should reduce the $135 billion fine against Big Tobacco to $10 billion.

* The same year as terrorist killed 3030 Americans, 17,000 Americans -- more than 5 times as died on 9/11 -- died from illicit drug use. Yet just this week I read this dispatch from our war front in Afghanistan:

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon, engaged in a difficult fight to defeat a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, has resisted entreaties from U.S. anti-narcotics officials to play an aggressive role in the faltering campaign to curb the country's opium trade...Military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug bazaars, rebuff some requests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and do little to counter the organized crime syndicates shipping the drug to Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the United States, according to officials and documents. (Afghanistan now provides upwards of 90% of the heroin coming into the US, and this years crop has been a record. )

So, let me get this straight. We will go to war against anyone that kills 3030 Americans in one year by flying planes into office buildings, but have no interest in going to war against those that kill 17,000 Americans every year by providing them deadly drugs.

Meanwhile, now self-financed by this booming drug trade, the Taliban is making a strong comeback in Afghanistan.

Maybe it's time for the Baker/Hamilton commission to get to work on an Afghanistan report.

Yes Virginia, George W. Bush is a moron. No need for special commission to verify that. The evidence -- and bodies -- mount by the hour.

"The total figure of men who have been killed, disabled or detained for long periods of time adds up to more than one and a half million," Khalid Hameed, chief of the Iraqi al-Raya human rights organisation told IPS. "The average number of Iraqi family members is seven, so about ten million Iraqis are facing the worst living circumstances."

In these circumstances, he said, women have had to "search for ways to survive and support their families at a time when not much help comes from the international community."

Most international NGOs left the country by last year apparently on the advice of governments of their countries pointing to growing violence and dangers to NGO members.

"International NGOs were conducting support projects for Iraqi women before they suddenly quit and left the country in a rush in October 2005," Faris Daghistani, who was project manager at the Baghdad mission for the Italian humanitarian aid organisation in Iraq INTERSOS told IPS.

"There was a wide focus on working women and how to support them by training and providing them with necessary tools to raise income on their own," he said. "It is a pity that most of our productive projects have stopped, and we had to leave women to face their fate on their own."

The violence since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is not the first to have taken its toll. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed, taken prisoner or disabled during the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq.

"We have never lived our lives as human beings should live," 42-year-old Dr Shatha Ahmed told IPS at her home in Baghdad. "The Iraq-Iran war took our fathers, and now the Bush war is taking our husbands and sons."

Women now face a long struggle surviving and bringing up families on their own, she said. "We could not even dream of developing our own skills."

Dr. Shatha's husband, also a doctor, was killed by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army in September this year when he was leaving the Ministry of Health offices in Baghdad. She now has to support her family, and her husband's parents as well.

Some help is on offer to widows through groups such as the Iraqi Red Crescent, the Islamic Party, the Muslim Scholars Association and non-governmental organisations. But this support is not well organised, and is insufficient to help the growing number of widows.

The Social Affairs Office of the government has started paying the equivalent of about 100 dollars monthly to widows. But this payment cannot support whole families, given particularly the shooting inflation.

And the payment is not easy to get. "I had to pay a lot of money as bribes to government officials in order to get the monthly support payment, and that is not enough to support my big family," 47-year-old widow Haja Saadiya Hussein from Baghdad told IPS.

"Americans killed my husband last year near a checkpoint, and now I have to work as a servant in government officials' houses to earn a living for my six children. I have stopped them going to school, to cut my expenses."

Some widows have attempted to remarry in order to find support. Some second husbands, who are usually older, offer to take care of their new sons for religious reasons.

"There can be no compensation for losing a husband," a spokesperson from the Iraqi Red Crescent's social support department told IPS. "The world is responsible for these women who lost their spouses in the name of the international community."

In the village of Jalameda, near Ishaqi, 90 km (50 miles) north of the capital, police said they found the bodies of 17 dead civilians in the rubble of the family homes of brothers Mohammed Hussein Jalmoud and Mahmoud Hussein Jalmoud.

Captain Nasser Abdul Majeed told Reuters that the 17 included six women and five children. They had been sent to the regional capital Tikrit to determine the cause of death.

The houses, surrounded by open fields, were flattened in the raid, leaving little but rubble and twisted steel rods.

Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said the statement on al Qaeda referred to the Ishaqi incident.

It is an area where the Sunni insurgency is active. Earlier, Ishaqi police and the mayor put the death toll as high as 32.

"The Americans have done this before but they always deny it," Ishaqi Mayor Amer Alwan told Reuters by telephone.

"I want the world to know what's happening here."

In March, Ishaqi police and officials accused U.S. troops of tying up and shooting dead six adults and five children and then calling in an air strike to destroy the house. An investigation by the U.S. unit involved concluded there was no wrongdoing.

It did, however, also find that there were up to nine "collateral deaths" of civilians, as opposed to the three which the military originally reported.

COMPLAINTS

That incident was one of a handful involving civilian deaths that came to light in the past year which have been investigated by the U.S. military, including the deaths of two dozen civilians in the town of Haditha in November 2005.

At least five marines are expected to be charged soon with offences, possibly including murder, U.S. officials have said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said shortly after taking office in April that he was losing patience with reports of U.S. troops killing civilians. Many Iraqis believe unjustified killings by U.S. troops are common, but few have been confirmed by official investigations.

Such sentiments are among reasons cited by many Iraqis for wanting an end to the U.S. military presence, although many also share the concerns of some U.S. officials that a hasty withdrawal could precipitate greater sectarian violence.

In its statement on Friday's strike, the U.S. military said: "Coalition Forces targeted the location based on intelligence reports that indicated associates with links to multiple al Qaeda in
Iraq networks were operating in the area."

Ground forces were searching buildings when they came under heavy machinegun fire from one of the buildings. The ground forces returned fire, killing two militants, it said. The troops then called in an air strike that killed 18 more militants.

This is also the language of the Arab world, always waiting for the collapse of empire, for the destruction of the safe Western world which has provided it with money, weapons, political support. First, the Arabs trusted the British Empire and Winston Churchill, and then they trusted the American Empire and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and all the other men who would give guns to the Israelis and billions to the Arabs - Nixon, Carter, Clinton, Bush...

And now they are told that the Americans are not winning the war; that they are losing. If you were an Arab, what would you do?

Be sure, they are not asking this question in Washington. The Middle East - so all-important (supposedly) in the "war on terror" - in itself, a myth - doesn't really matter in the White House. It is a district, a map, a region, every bit as amorphous as the crescent of "crisis" which the Clinton administration invented when it wanted to land its troops in Somalia. How to get out, how to save face, that's the question. To hell with the people who live there: the Arabs, the Iraqis, the men, women and children whom we kill - and whom the Iraqis kill - every day.

Note how our "spokesmen" in Afghanistan now acknowledge the dead woman and children of Nato airstrikes as if it is quite in order to slaughter these innocents because we are at war with the horrid Taliban.

Some of the same mindset has arrived in Baghdad, where "coalition" spokesmen also - from time to time - jump in front of the video-tape evidence by accepting that they, too, kill women and children in their war against "terror". But it is the sentences of impotence that doom empires. "The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing." There is a risk of a "slide towards chaos [sic] [that] could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe."

But hasn't that already happened? "Collapse" and "catastrophe" are daily present in Iraq. America's ability "to influence events" has been absent for years. And let's just re-read the following sentence: "Violence is increasing in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency. Shiite [Shia] militias, death squads, al-Qa'ida and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability."

Come again? Where was this "widespread criminality," this "sectarian conflict" when Saddam, our favourite war criminal, was in power? What do the Iraqis think about this? And how typical that the American media went at once to hear Bush's view of the Baker report - rather than the reaction of the Iraqis, those who are on the receiving end of our self-induced tragedy in Mesopotamia.

They will enjoy the idea that American troops should be "embedded" with Iraqi forces - not so long ago, it was the press that had to be "embedded" with the Americans! - as if the Romans were ready to put their legions amid the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths to ensure their loyalty.

What the Romans did do, of course - and what the Americans would never do - is offer their subjects Roman citizenship. Every tribe - in Gaul or Bythinia or Mesopotamia - who fell under Roman rule became a citizen of Rome. What could Washington have done with Iraq if it had offered American citizenship to every Iraqi? There would have been no insurrection, no violence, no collapse or catastrophe, no Baker report. But no. We wanted to give these people the fruits of our civilisation - not the civilisation itself. From this, they were banned.

And the result? The nations we supposedly hated - Iran and Syria - are now expected to save us from ourselves. "Given the ability [sic] of Iran and Syria to influence events and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage [sic] them constructively."

I love those words. Especially "engage". Yes, the "influence of America" is diminishing. The influence of Syria and Iran is growing. That just about sums up the "war on terror". Any word yet, I wonder, from Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara?

The strategies

The Baker panel considered four options, all of which it rejected:

Cut And Run

Baker believes it would cause a humanitarian disaster, while al-Qa'ida would expand further.

Stay The Course

Baker accepts that current US policy is not working. Nearly 100 Americans are dying every month. The US is spending $2bn (£1bn) a week and has lost public support.

Send In More Troops

Increases in US troop levels would not solve the cause of violence in Iraq. Violence would simply rekindle as soon as US forces moved.

Regional Devolution

If the country broke up into its Shia, Sunni and Kurd regions, it would lead to ethnic cleansing and mass population moves.

Baker outlines a fifth option - 'responsible transition' - in which the number of US forces could be increased to shore up the Iraqi army while it takes over primary responsibility for combat operations. US troops would then decrease slowly.

Bush lavished praise on the Iraq Study Group, calling its Wednesday report as "worthy of serious study."

"The American people expect us to come up with a new strategy," he said at a joint press conference with Blair. "We need a new approach," he said.

Bush also described the situation in Iraq as "bad."

Initially he described the violence in Iraq, which the report warned could spiral into a regional war, as "unsettling."

Later, when asked how he could convince the public that he is not in denial and was sincere about a policy overhaul, Bush responded: "It's bad in Iraq. That help?

"You want frankness? I thought we would succeed quicker than we did. And I am disappointed by the pace of success," he said.

Blair said his trip to the Middle East would show that Britain and the United States could be trusted as honest brokers in the region, despite their Iraq entanglement.

"I believe that by moving this forward, we send a very strong signal -- not just to the region but to the whole of the world -- that we are even-handed and just in the application of our values," Blair said.

Blair said his main goals would be to seek the release of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, whose kidnap in Gaza in June sparked fierce Israeli-Palestinian clashes, and to seek ways to speed formation of a Palestinian national unity government acceptable as a negotiating partner to Israel.

"We need to get the door unlocked, because it's kind of barred at the moment, and it needs to be opened," Blair said.

The prime minister's visit was to set the stage for a Middle East visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in early 2007, her eighth trip in two years to Israel and the Palestinian territories, her spokesman said.

Bush cautioned that the review, led by former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton, was one of many, citing pending reviews by the Pentagon, US State Department, and national security council.

Bush was cool on two key commission proposals -- talks with Iran and Syria, and withdrawing most US combat troops by early 2008.

"I've always said we'd like our troops out as fast as possible," he said, while insisting on the need to be "flexible and realistic" and tying any change in troop level to advice from US military commanders, as he has in the past.

Bush said he would make a speech outlining his strategy "after I get the reports," a move the White House says will come in weeks.

Bush said Damascus and Tehran might be welcome for talks if they renounced support for extremists and pledged support for Baghdad's fledgling government, otherwise "they shouldn't bother to show up."

Bush also reiterated his longstanding condition that Iran freeze sensitive nuclear work before any direct talks.

"Should they agree to verifiably suspend their (uranium) enrichment, the United States will be at the table with our partners," he said, telling Tehran: "There's no need to continue this obstinance."

The Bush-Blair meeting followed November 7 US legislative elections, in which Bush's Republican Party lost the control of Congress to the opposition Democrats.

It also came one week after a dispute inside the State Department, triggered by a senior analyst saying he was "ashamed" of the way Bush treated Blair and that US-British relations were "totally one-sided" in Washington's favor.

"The report made by the Baker-Hamilton committee is lucid. From our point of view, it reflects the actual situation in Iraq," Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said in a statement.

"As France has always said, there can be no military solution to the deep crisis that Iraq is going through. The report does not fix a precise timetable for withdrawal, but it does set a horizon. That is also what we are saying," he said.

"To ensure that the withdrawal does not lead to chaos, it is vitally important to have a political process which can bring Iraqis together and isolate the extremists and terrorists," he said.

Douste-Blazy also said that he "agreed with the appeal which is made to the US to involve itself totally in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would open up room for manoeuvre to solve other crises in the region."

When asked if he would pull U.S. troops out of Iraq even it was seen as a defeat for the U.S., Gore dodged the question, saying if he were president, he would have "the full flow of information" and he would be able to test these ideas.

On the question of whether he would run for president in 2008, Gore once again said he is involved in a different kind of campaign - to educate people about climate change - and that he isn't planning to do so but he hasn't completely ruled it out.

When asked if Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is the man to beat on the Democratic side in 2008, Gore said once again, "I think it's too early to evaluate the candidates who look like they are planning to run." Gore gave a similar answer about Obama when he was interviewed last month by ABC Radio's David Blaustein.

Many Americans are still fighting the Vietnam war. They see Iraq through the lens of the futile Vietnam misadventure and express their dismay that America will lose another war because "the Democrats will cut and run like they did in Vietnam." These Americans have forgotten that it was a Republican administration that got the US out of Vietnam and that it was the Democrats who committed the US to that conflict. Moreover, Democrats are not showing a cut and run propensity.

For example, Silvestre Reyes, the incoming Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says the US cannot withdraw from Iraq until it has dismantled the militias. Reyes wants to put 30,000 more US troops into Iraq to dismantle the militias. Reyes has forgotten that sending more troops was the Democrats' policy in Vietnam, a policy whose only result was that more Americans lost sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers.

Obviously, sending more US troops will not succeed in dismantling the Iraqi sectarian militias. However, a US attempt to dismantle the militias will result in the militias joining the insurgency and turning on the US troops. The situation would deteriorate, not improve. It is frightening that the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee does not understand this.

The appearance of a ray of realism about Iraq in the Senate Arms Services Committee does not mean that the US will escape catastrophe. At the Armed Services Committee hearing (Dec. 5), some senators said that US troops must not be used in a civil war between Iraqis, but that the troops have to stay until stability is created. Senators have the idea that US troops can be shorn of their combat role, but remain to train the Iraqi army so the Iraqi government can put down insurgency and civil war.

However, in civil war each side has a government and an army. Which side will the US support? If the US sides with the Sunnis against the majority Shiites, it will be throwing in its lot with the insurgency that has been killing its troops and find itself arrayed against the more numerous Shiites backed by Iran. If the US favors the Shiite majority, the US will anger its Sunni allies in the Middle East.

Indeed, civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, with or without US involvement, could easily spread throughout the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was not the only country where Sunnis hold political sway over Shiites. By invading Iraq, stirring up extremism, and setting in motion sectarian violence, the Bush regime may have opened Pandora's Box of civil war throughout the Middle East.

The neoconservative Bush regime lacked the brains to understand that defeating Saddam Hussein's army would not give the US control over Iraq. Whatever minimum control the US might once have had is gone.

The US army in Iraq has so little control that it cannot even provide sufficient security for President Bush to meet in Iraq with Prime Minister Maliki.

Since the US army has no control, provides no security, and does not know who it is fighting, US troops simply provide targets for insurgents. They are accomplishing nothing positive and should be withdrawn. US troops in Iraq serve one purpose: They are a provocation that foments Islamic extremism and creates dangerous instability throughout the Middle East.

The senators and Robert Gates haven't got this far in their comprehension. The question is whether they will see the light before US troops are forced to pay a higher price for their government's stupidity.

A minority of Americans still believe the US can defeat the Iraqi insurgency if only the US would use enough force. Americans hear this from neoconservatives and from the right-wing crazies of talk radio. These are the same Americans who believe the US could have won the Vietnam war by invading or nuking North Vietnam.

The US probably could have defeated North Vietnam on a one-on-one basis. However, just as General MacArthur's invasion of North Korea brought in the Chinese, a US invasion of North Vietnam would have been an extreme provocation for the Soviet Union and China and could have ended in nuclear war.

Many Americans have the absurd notion that the only limit to US power is the will to use it. This absurd idea provides the Israeli lobby with a vocal American minority that is easy to exploit in behalf of "standing tough" in the Middle East. The main reason that neither Republicans nor Democrats can come to their senses about Iraq and America's disastrous Middle East policy is that the Israeli Lobby will not let them.

Right-wing Israeli governments suffer the same delusion as neoconservatives about limitless US power. They believe that the power of their lobby can ensure that American power will be used to destroy all of Israel's enemies.

The US is likely to remain mired in Iraq until Israelis cast out this delusion. No amount of US power can make it possible for Israel to both steal Palestine from Palestinians and have peace. No number of US invasions of Islamic countries can win "the war on terror." As long as right-wing extremism prevails in Israel and as long as the US interferes in the internal affairs of Muslin countries, the formula for calamity remains in place.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

"In addition to a 26 percent production increase over the past year -- for a total of 5,644 metric tons -- the amount of land under cultivation in opium poppies grew by 61 percent. Cultivation in the two main production provinces, Helmand in the southwest and Oruzgan in central Afghanistan, was up by 132 percent."

With a flair for understatement, White House drug policy chief John Walters called the news "disappointing." I'd say it was shocking. But curiously, the "resurgent Taliban forces" were cited "as the main impediment to stabilization and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and the U.S. military investment has far exceeded anti-narcotic and development programs."

But Walters went so far as to say "the drug trade as a problem . . . rivals and in some ways exceeds the Taliban, threatening to derail other aspects of U.S. policy." But I thought when those bearded brigands, the Taliban, were there, poppy production was near nil, 94% gone.

Somehow this brings to mind a Michael Ruppert article, "The Bush-Cheney Drug Empire," published in Nexus Magazine. He wrote, "The Bush family's involvement in drug-running is an open secret, but Dick Cheney's direct link to a global drug pipeline through a US construction company is less well known." Sparing no toes, Mike takes the next step . . .

From Medellin To Moscow With Brown & Root

"Halliburton Corporation's Brown & Root is one of the major components of the Bush-Cheney Drug Empire. The success of Bush Vice-Presidential running mate Richard Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five-year, US $3.8 billion 'pig-out' on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is only a partial indicator of what may happen, now that the Bush ticket has won the US presidential election."

But is Cheney's former company's subsidiary, Brown and Root, involved in Afghanistan as well? Well, The Center for Public Integrity reports, "KBR was awarded a $100 million contract in 2002 to build a new U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, from the State Department." Ah, so. And . . .

"KBR has also been awarded 15 LOGCAP [Logistics Civil Augmentation Program] task orders worth more than $216 million for work under 'Operation Enduring Freedom,' the military name for operations in Afghanistan. These include establishing base camps at Kandahar and Bagram Air Force Base and training foreign troops from the Republic of Georgia."

But hasn't the CIA traditionally had a hand in Afghanistan's drug business, going back to the 80s, and also with the Iran-Contra scam, providing a continuous drug-revenue stream to what has been called "our shadow government," sponsor of worldwide dark ops? Again, according to Ruppert, the Afghanistan opium growing began with the CIA around that time.

CIA planted the opium currently growing

Ruppert says, "Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world's opium. But then the CIA moved in, and by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world's heroin supply. By 1999, they were churning out 3,200 TONS of heroin a year ­ nearly 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened. The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed nearly all of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3,000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction! This enormous drop in revenue subsequently hurt not only the CIA's Black Budget projects, but also the free-flow of laundered money in and out of the Controller's banks"

University of Wisconsin History Professor Alfred McCoy, writing for The World Traveler, mostly corroborates Ruppert's views . . ."Within a few years, the currents of global geopolitics then shifted in ways that pushed the CIA into new alliances with drug traffickers. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Sandinista revolution seized Nicaragua, prompting two CIA covert operations with some revealing similarities.

"During the 1980s, while the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the CIA, working through Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, spent some $2 billion to support the Afghan resistance. When the operation started in 1979, this region grew opium only for regional markets and produced no heroin.

"Within two years, however, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979 to 5,000 in 1981 and to 1.2 million by 1985-a much steeper rise than in any other nation.

"CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujaheddin guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.

"In May 1990, as the CIA operation was winding down, The Washington Post published a front-page expose charging that Gulbudin Hekmatar, the ClA's favored Afghan leader, was a major heroin manufacturer. The Post argued, in a manner similar to the San Jose Mercury News's later report about the contras, that U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies 'because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.'"

Bottom line

So, I guess we "inspired" the Afghans to grow heroin, we exported it to finance dark ops, including a full-scale war. Therefore the miracle of the poppies popping back this year must be what, an accident, an ill wind that blows no good, the testy Taliban or those warlock warlords who fought with us once, or conceivably the favorite U.S. contractor, Brown and Root, in the middle of some larger CIA effort?

Returning for an answer to the Washington Post article, its author Karen DeYoung reported that "Gen. James L. Jones, supreme allied NATO commander said in a recent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Afghanistan is NATO's biggest operation with more than 30,000 troops. Drug cartels with their own armies engage in regular combat with NATO forces deployed in Afghanistan. He said, 'It would be wrong to say that it is just the Taliban. I think I need to set that record straight.'" Well all right. We like straight talk.

DeYoung also reports, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden told Congress last month, "It's almost the devil's own problem . . . Right now the issue is stability. . . . Going in there in itself and attacking the drug trade actually feeds the instability that you want to overcome." You'll excuse me while I go and think about that one, "the devil's own problem." And who would that devil be?

Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, agrees. He said, "Attacking the problem directly in terms of the drug trade . . . would undermine the attempt to gain popular support in the region. There's a real conflict I think." I think so, too. The conflict seems to be between the people who seeded and grew the opium business and who are now faced with losing their profits from it completely.

We also have Afghan President Hamid Karzai noting that, "once we thought terrorism was Afghanistan's biggest enemy . . ." I believe that was a Bush-Cheney proposition, not "we" as in all of America's citizens. Part of that supposition was that we needed to attack the country because it was "harboring" bin Laden and his baddies. To date, bin Laden eludes his pursuers. The president claims he is no longer important. And to finish President Karzai's quote, now he says "poppy, its cultivation and drugs are Afghanistan's major enemy." Aha.

So let's go get the purveyors. But DeYoung tells us, "Eradication and alternative development programs have made little discernible headway. Cultivation -- measured annually with high-resolution satellite imagery that is then parsed by analysts using specialized computer software -- is nearly double its highest pre-Karzai level."

So what does that expensively mined data really tell us? Perhaps, aside from friends at his former employer, Unocal, the pipeline folks, President Karzai may have more friends at the seemingly befuddled CIA, not to mention Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root, the ineffable Mr. Cheney's former firm.

Perhaps that was stated more delicately by Karen DeYoung: "After the overthrow of the Taliban government by U.S. forces in the fall of that year [2001], the Bush administration said that keeping a lid on production among its highest priorities. But corruption and alliances formed by Washington and the Afghan government with anti-Taliban tribal chieftains, some of whom are believed to be deeply involved in the trade, undercut the effort." The italics are mine. The sin is theirs.