Witnesses said the attacks in Baghdad's Tayaran Square involved a suicide bomber who approached the group of Shia day-labourers claiming he was interested in hiring them. As they climbed into his minibus, a bomb was detonated. At the same moment, a bomb was set off in a car parked 30 yards away. Some reports said as many as 71 people had been killed.

Khalil Ibrahim, a local shop owner told the Associated Press: "In the first explosion, I saw people falling over, some of them blown apart. When the other bomb went off seconds later, it slammed me into a wall of my store and I fainted."

In White House meetings yesterday, President Bush consulted senior military commanders, his outgoing defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement Robert Gates, and was later to hold a meeting with the visiting Iraqi Vice-President, Tariq al-Hashemi, leader of the most powerful Sunni Arab party in Iraq.

Mr Bush has been under growing pressure to announce a new strategy since the Republicans' resounding defeat in the mid-term elections and, even more so, since the publication last week of the report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) which called for regional diplomacy, a boosting of Iraqi security forces with US trainers and withdrawal of most combat troops by 2008.

But a White House official told reporters that it was "more likely" Mr Bush would lay out his new plan after 25 December. "He's been pushing the bureaucracy pretty hard," said the official. "There's still work to be done. The key here is to get it done right."

Much of the discussion among the President and his advisers has apparently focused on efforts to persuade the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to do more to tackle armed militias. This is likely to be easier said than done; there are many militias operating in Iraq, all with competing political loyalties, and the government's resources for dealing with security issues are sparse.

Some critics have said Mr Maliki is unwilling to act because one of his leading backers is the Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who controls the Mehdi Army, one of the largest and most powerful militias. The ISG report suggested withholding US support for the Iraqi government if it failed to reach a series of milestones. Yesterday, amid reports that two major partners in his coalition government had been holding talks about ways of reducing the cleric's influence, Mr Maliki said there was no alternative to his government.

"What is going on now is positive when the aim, contrary to what has been said, is to broaden the government's political base and not an attempt to undermine its ideology or to search for alternatives," he said. "There is no alternative in Iraq for this national unity government because it is the guarantee for the political process to continue."

The Court of Appeal in London has rejected an attempt by the mothers of two British soldiers killed in Iraq to force the Government to hold a public inquiry into the war. "Such an inquiry would inevitably involve, not only questions of international law, but also questions of policy, which are essentially matters for the executive and not the courts," the court ruled.

One discusses how the civil war could be stopped with renewed determination or a better strategy. One takes refuge in the fiction of transferring responsibility to the Iraqi government, but outside the "Green Zone" the power of the Iraqi government is more wish than reality. One plans to improve and accelerate the training of the Iraqi armed forces, as though this weren't the goal for the past four years. One fantasizes that the Baghdad government is capable of stripping the powerful militia of Shiite leader Muktada al-Sadr of its weapons - defying the balance of power at the whim of the United States.

INTELLIGENT THOUGHT IS AN OPTION

In the coming weeks it will become clear if George W. Bush will accept his Shadow Cabinet [the Iraq Study Group] and finally display the courage to face reality squarely, as does the Baker Commission and his new Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. During his confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate Gates did something that quite sensational for Washington: he described reality without using euphemistic language. Nowhere was this more apparent that in his remarks about Iran. In the White house, the face of that Dr. Strangelove Dick Cheney must have become flush with anger. Yes: Tehran is striving to acquire nuclear weapons, but a war against is nevertheless a dangerous idea, and should be considered only of the existential interests of the United States are directly threatened.

Gates appearance comes just in time to impede any Bush attack plans against Iran and at the same time, to help prevent the Persian Gulf and Middle East from going up in flames. For Iraqis, his realism comes too late. Richard Holbrooke, the mediator during the war in Yugoslavia, is of the opinion that not even a drastic change in course by President Bush can put the evil genie back in the bottle. The civil war cannot be stopped; the sticks and carrots coming out of Washington are no match for the dynamics of domination now playing out in the cradle of Western civilization.

Will this conflict escalate into a full-blown regional war, which is the worst-case-scenario that Gates and many experts fear? Not necessarily. Countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and also Iran have shown that despite internal tensions, they are capable of cool, calculated statesmanship. As of now, nothing is certain. But both outcomes - a local civil war or a regional conflagration - are similarly unpredictable. The events in Iraq have triggered deeply-rooted emotions in neighboring countries which could quickly wipe away the sober cost-benefit analysis after a withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Thus Iran - the nuclear power in waiting - is attempting to create a Shiite bloc consisting of Alawite government in Damascus, the terror group Hezbullah in Lebanon and the Shiite coalition in Iraq. The goal is to end the age-old Sunni supremacy over Islam. The acting-ruling-powers in Tehran can count on the support of all Iraqi and Lebanese Shiites, who for centuries have felt suppressed within their own societies.

The center of gravity for Sunnis is Saudi Arabia. For their part, the Saudis have declared their intention to prevent this scenario with all necessary force. Riyadh has put Washington on notice: If the United States leaves Iraq and delivers them into the hands of raging Shiite supremacists, the Saudi Kingdom will have no choice but to side with their tribal brothers - and if necessary enter into a direct confrontation with Iran. This sensational threat by the oil monarchy reflects a defense of the founding principles of the Saudi Kingdom.

UNRESOLVED HISTORICAL CONFLICTS

Just like the Balkans in the 1990s, we are experiencing the perverse resurrection of historical conflicts far more powerful then common sense or compromise. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the democratic renaissance of Eastern and Central Europe and the transformation of China into a free market economy had given many on the West cause for optimism, but the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan make such hopes seem like a naive dream.

So Western democracy and the model of Western freedom don't necessarily appeal to the millions of men in the Arab world, and the emancipation of women is not considered progress, but rather as a threat to their identity. This doesn't render the worldwide battle to spread of Western values and improve the legal status of women either wrong or hopeless. Yet the West will have to recognize that the kinds of changes that we fought for decades to realize cannot be exported everywhere else overnight.

No one has paid a crueler price for this latest failure to achieve Western utopia that the Iraqis, who were delivered from the clutches of dictatorship only to be plunged into a nightmarish civil war. The West will have to grapple with the fact that orgy of violence in Iraq will have serious and long-lasting effects on the standing and "Soft Power" of its leading power, the United States. The mythos of the worldwide management competence of the American governing elite and the oversight mechanisms of American democracy has been shattered. Destroyed is the trust in the American government and its military might; They Come, They Saw, They Conquered. Rome has lost its magic, and that is as it was before, bad news for the world.

Thomas Klau is FTD's Washington correspondent. He writes here every second Thursday.

Sectarian violence between once-dominant minority Sunnis and majority Shi'ites is killing more than 120 people a day, United Nations officials say. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes and fears of all-out civil war are rising.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government, racked by sectarian tensions that have paralyzed decision-making, has struggled to rein in violence blamed on Sunni Islamist insurgent groups such as al Qaeda and Shi'ite militias.

Maliki is to host a national reconciliation conference in Baghdad on Saturday which aims to bring together Kurdish, Sunni, Shi'ite and secular political groups. But many Iraqis fear the violence may be too far gone to be stopped.

Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the deputy U.S. commander in Iraq, reiterated on Monday that war could not be won by military might alone and said progress was also needed on the political and economic fronts to regain Iraqis' confidence.

Maliki has accused Iraqi political leaders of fuelling the violence with their reluctance to compromise.

BOMBS

Wednesday's violence included two car bombs which exploded simultaneously in the religiously mixed New Baghdad district, killing five people and wounding 10, an Interior Ministry official said.

Police said three roadside bombs and a car bomb exploded near the main Yarmouk hospital in western Baghdad, wounding two people.

North of the capital, two suicide bombers struck an Iraqi army base in the town of Riyadh, some 60 km (40 miles) south of the volatile oil city of Kirkuk, killing seven soldiers and wounding 15, the police added.

Police General Torhan Abdul Rahman said the first bomber detonated his vehicle after ramming the gate of the base. The second bomber managed to enter the base.

Iraqi soldiers have been frequent targets of Sunni insurgents fighting U.S. forces and the Shi'ite-led government, although attacks on bases are relatively unusual.

A bipartisan high-level panel, the Iraq Study Group, has recommended that President George W. Bush accelerate the training of Iraq's security forces to pave the way for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in 2008.

The top U.S. generals in Iraq briefed Bush on Monday as part of a series of meetings he is holding this week to discuss the future of Iraq after giving a largely cool reception to the panel's recommendations for changing course in the war, which is hugely unpopular among Americans.

The White House said Bush would delay announcing a new Iraq strategy until the new year.