From today’s New York Times…

Last week Robert Stein Jr. was charged in federal court with a slew of crimes allegedly committed while he was a financial officer for the American occupation authority in Iraq. The affidavit in the case says that Mr. Stein accepted over $200,000 a month to steer contracts to an American businessman whose companies often did poor work and sometimes did no work at all.

The case is a painful reminder of the absolute dearth of planning for rebuilding Iraq after the war. According to reporting by James Glanz in The Times, Mr. Stein was convicted of a fraud-related felony in 1996 and also fired from a job in 2002 for falsifying payroll records and invoices. The American government then sent him to help oversee construction projects in Hilla and the Shiite holy city of Karbala, with $82 million in taxpayer funds.

There must be accountability higher up for this clearly bad judgment. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. Officials at the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction say they are pursuing 50 more cases and have already referred at least six more to prosecutors.

Sobering OpenDemocracy piece by Paul Rogers about the escalating conflict between Iran and the US. Excerpt:

This fundamental clash of perceptions between Washington and Tehran shows no sign of diminishing. Indeed, the current Iranian rhetoric simply makes it easier for the United States (or Israel) to consider the use of force if diplomacy fails to fix the nuclear issue. The problem for these prospective assailants is that any such action might entail serious and unexpected escalation.

Iran would have several options in the event of a US or Israeli attack: direct Revolutionary Guard involvement across the border in Iraq, making the predicament of US forces almost impossible; encouraging Hizbollah to open a “Lebanon front” with Israel; even the temporary closure of the Straits of Hormuz to create an oil-market panic. The stakes are therefore very high and it will take some extraordinary efforts by diplomats, mediators and others – including the Russians – to encourage the Washington and Tehran administrations to acquire a realistic sense of each other’s point of view…

From today’s New York Times…

Mr. Bush’s own way of talking about the future, in Iraq and beyond, has undergone a subtle but significant change in recent weeks. In several speeches, he has begun warning that the insurgency is already metastasizing into a far broader struggle to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” While he still predicts victory, he appears to be preparing the country for a struggle of cold war proportions. It is a very different tone than administration officials sounded in the heady days after Saddam Hussein’s fall, and then his capture.

After an extensive debate inside the White House, Mr. Bush has begun directly rebutting the arguments laid out in manifestos and missives from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. bin Laden’s top aide. He did so again on Saturday, quoting from one of Mr. Zawahiri’s purported letters – one whose authenticity is still the subject of some question – which predicted that the Iraq war would end as Vietnam had, and that, in Mr. Bush’s words, “America can be made to run again.”

The president argued anew that the terrorist leader was “gravely mistaken.””There’s always the question of whether we give these guys more credibility by directly addressing their arguments,” one of Mr. Bush’s most senior aides said recently. “But the president was concerned that we hadn’t described Iraq to the American people for what it is – a struggle of ideologies that isn’t going to end with one election, or one constitution, or even a string of elections.”

Sound familiar? Check out Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, a sobering account of how the US got sucked into an unwinnable war in Vietnam.

From this morning’s New York Times…

The explosion that killed 14 marines in Haditha yesterday was powerful enough to flip the 25-ton amphibious assault vehicle they were riding in, in keeping with an increasingly deadly trend, American military officers say.

In recent months the roadside bombs favored by insurgents in Iraq have grown significantly in size and sophistication, the officers say, adding to their deadliness and defeating efforts to increase troops’ safety by adding armor to vehicles.

The new problems facing the military were displayed more than a week earlier, on July 23, when a huge bomb buried on a road southwest of Baghdad Airport detonated an hour before dark underneath a Humvee carrying four American soldiers.

The explosive device was constructed from a bomb weighing 500 pounds or more that was meant to be dropped from an aircraft, according to military explosives experts, and was probably Russian in origin.

The blast left a crater 6 feet deep and nearly 17 feet wide. All that remained of the armored vehicle afterward was the twisted wreckage of the front end, a photograph taken by American officers at the scene showed. The four soldiers were killed.

A special Memex service. From today’s New York Times…

“We are capturing or killing a lot of insurgents,” said a senior Army intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make his assessments public. “But they’re being replaced quicker than we can interdict their operations. There is always another insurgent ready to step up and take charge.”

At the same time, the Americans acknowledge that they are no closer to understanding the inner workings of the insurgency or stemming the flow of foreign fighters, who are believed to be conducting a vast majority of suicide attacks. The insurgency, believed to be an unlikely mix of Baath Party die-hards and Islamic militants, has largely eluded the understanding of American intelligence officers since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government 27 months ago.

The danger is that the violence could overwhelm the intensive American-backed efforts now under way to draw Iraq’s Sunni Arabs into the political mainstream, leaving the community more embittered than ever and setting the stage for even more violence and possibly civil war.

From today’s New York Times…

WASHINGTON, July 20 – About half of Iraq’s new police battalions are still being established and cannot conduct operations, while the other half of the police units and two-thirds of the new army battalions are only “partially capable” of carrying out counterinsurgency missions, and only with American help, according to a newly declassified Pentagon assessment.

Only “a small number” of Iraqi security forces are capable of fighting the insurgency without American assistance, while about one-third of the army is capable of “planning, executing and sustaining counterinsurgency operations” with allied support, the analysis said.

The assessment, which has not been publicly released, is the most precise analysis of the Iraqis’ readiness levels that the military has provided. Bush administration officials have repeatedly said the 160,000 American-led allied troops cannot begin to withdraw until Iraqi troops are ready to take over security.