Richard Haass’s sobering article in Foreign Affairs opens thus:

Just over two centuries since Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt heralded the advent of the modern Middle East — some 80 years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism, and less than 20 years after the end of the Cold War — the American era in the Middle East, the fourth in the region’s modern history, has ended. Visions of a new, Europe-like region — peaceful, prosperous, democratic — will not be realized. Much more likely is the emergence of a new Middle East that will cause great harm to itself, the United States, and the world…

Haass is the President of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was chief of the Middle-East desk of the National Security Council for George Bush Snr, and director of policy planning in the state department during Dubya’s first term. Sidney Blumenthal (not the most reliable of sources IMHO) thinks that his views reflect those of James Baker, the man currently leading a survey of the policy options available in Iraq. The Foreign Affairs article is long and detailed. Haass produced a more accessible summary of it for the Financial Times. Thankfully, it remains outside that organ’s odious paywall.

Interesting OpenDemocracy column by Paul Rogers…

The open discussion of possible military failure in Iraq can no longer be concealed (see Leslie Gelb, “Would defeat in Iraq be so bad?” Time, 15 October 2006). In this context, it is worth recalling that the wider purposes of US involvement in Iraq make a substantive withdrawal from the region unlikely in the extreme.

The last column in this series pointed to the aspiration that underlay the 2003 invasion – a free-market client state in Iraq, obedient to Washington’s interests and with a sufficient American presence at four permanent bases to maintain US influence and ensure the survival of an Iraqi government (see “New frontiers: from Iraq to outer space”, 19 October 2006).

This outcome in Iraq was considered all the more desirable because of the uncertainty surrounding the stability of the House of Saud and the presence of that notorious rogue state – Iran – across the Persian Gulf. Indeed, the fundamental importance of Gulf oil over the next three decades or more meant that securing Iraq (in view of its location between Saudi Arabia and Iran as well its own oil) was the key to US policy success in the region. The fact that nearly two-thirds of the world’s oil can be sourced to the Gulf area, and with China destined to be almost as thirsty as the United States for its oil in the coming period, made American military dominance in the region utterly essential.

From this starting-point, a situation in which Iraq went its own violent way (either as a new jihadi base or as effectively a client of Tehran) was, and is, unthinkable. It follows that with all the talk of diverse options, there are really only two choices for the United States in Iraq – and a fallback “plan C” possibility if catastrophe should ensue.

The first choice is to continue the present campaign, perhaps reinforcing US troops if resources permit, in the hope that the insurgency will eventually wither away. All the indications are that this hope will not be realised, and that the United States will pay a high cost in waiting for it to do so.

The second choice is to abandon Iraq’s cities and consolidate US forces in a handful of heavily fortified military bases. The assumption would be that some kind of political accommodation will emerge in Iraq – possibly involving an autocratic regime – which would be obliged to accept long-term US influence based on sheer military power.

In some Washington circles this may seem an attractive second-best strategy, even if a permanent US presence in Iraq would be a target of jihadi paramilitaries and al-Qaida leaders. But in any case it may not prove tenable, and this would put the third possibility on the table: wholesale US withdrawal.

In terms of the fundamental need to maintain control in the Persian Gulf region this would be a foreign policy and security disaster for the United States greater in scale than Vietnam. This does not affect the near-certainty that people in the inner reaches of the Pentagon are thinking hard about the US’s options after a retreat from Iraq.

Item 1. From today’s New York Times

Given the rise in sectarian killings, a Sunni-based insurgency that appears to be as potent as ever and an Iraqi security establishment that continues to have difficulties deploying sufficient numbers of motivated and proficient forces in Baghdad, General Casey’s target seems to be an increasingly heroic assumption.

On paper, Iraq has substantial security forces. The Pentagon noted in an August report to Congress that Iraq had more than 277,000 troops and police officers, including some 115,000 army combat soldiers.

But those figures, which have often been cited at Pentagon news conferences as an indicator of progress and a potential exit strategy for American troops, paint a distorted picture. When the deep-seated reluctance of many soldiers to serve outside their home regions, leaves of absence and AWOL rates are taken into account, only a portion of the Iraqi Army is readily available for duty in Baghdad and other hot spots.

The fact that the Ministry of Defense has sent only two of the six additional battalions that American commanders have requested for Baghdad speaks volumes about the difficulty the Iraqi government has encountered in fielding a professional military. The four battalions that American commanders are still waiting for is equivalent to 2,800 soldiers, hardly a large commitment in the abstract but one that the Iraqis are still struggling to meet.

Item 2. Also from today’s New York Times

Overhead costs have consumed more than half the budget of some reconstruction projects in Iraq, according to a government estimate released yesterday, leaving far less money than expected to provide the oil, water and electricity needed to improve the lives of Iraqis.

The report provided the first official estimate that, in some cases, more money was being spent on housing and feeding employees, completing paperwork and providing security than on actual construction.

Those overhead costs have ranged from under 20 percent to as much as 55 percent of the budgets, according to the report, by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. On similar projects in the United States, those costs generally run to a few percent.

The highest proportion of overhead was incurred in oil-facility contracts won by KBR Inc., the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, which has frequently been challenged by critics in Congress and elsewhere.

The actual costs for many projects could be even higher than the estimates, the report said, because the United States has not properly tracked how much such expenses have taken from the $18.4 billion of taxpayer-financed reconstruction approved by Congress two years ago.

Fact: Dick Cheney, the current Vice-President of the US is a former CEO of Halliburton. According to this source,

An analysis released by a Democratic senator found that Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton stock options have risen 3,281 percent in the last year [2005] Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) asserts that Cheney’s options — worth $241,498 a year ago — are now valued at more than $8 million. The former CEO of the oil and gas services juggernaut, Cheney has pledged to give proceeds to charity.

Iraqi charities, one presumes?

Thoughtful piece by Michel Thieren in OpenDemocracy…

Two scientifically audited numbers today constitute the best available and most cited evidence quantifying Iraqi civilian deaths directly associated with the war in that country which began in March 2003. Each is generated by a credible and independent source, though their conclusions vary widely: one gives a running total of 48,783 (as of 18 October 2006), the other gives 654,965 for the period March 2003 to July 2006.

At this stage in the Iraq war, these different orders of magnitude for civilian casualties are too often relayed by a number-loving (and sensation-hungry) media in ways that both reflect and serve the preordained views of those in favour of or against the war. A statistical language about Iraqi casualties that is able to bring numbers and words, tallies and stories, into a coherent relationship requires understanding of what “48,783” and “654,965” are really measuring, how they were respectively computed, and what they reveal.

The nub of it seems to be that the lower figure compiled by Iraq Body Count measures only deaths directly attributable to interactions with Coalition forces, whereas the Johns Hopkins figures take into account the suicide bombing, ethnic cleansing and general mayhem now rife in Iraq (and causing 900 violent casualties aday).

This tasteful image shows part of the police station in Mosul as rebuilt by Iraqi contractors. Note the tree which, according to the NYT report, “was allowed to remain standing, and its trunk was cemented into the building’s structure”. It brings to mind T.E. Lawrence’s famous dictum:

“It is better that they do it imperfectly than that you do it perfectly. For it is their war and their country and your time here is limited.”

Surprise, surprise! The New York Times reports that

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official…

Rory Stewart, a youngish British soldier and diplomat, served as interim governor of a remote Iraqi province between September 2003 and June 2004. He’s written an account of his experiences which provides compelling evidence of the futility of the US’s ‘democratising’ mission in that benighted country. There’s a good review of the book by Robert Skidelsky in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. This deadpan passage in the review caught my eye:

An American expert on democracy came from Baghdad to do some “capacity building” with the new council. He drew an oblong box to represent the council, beneath it four boxes to represent its committees. “He is drawing a dog,” muttered one sheikh. “Welcome to your new democracy,” said the democracy expert. At this, “two of the sheikhs walked out”.