'Six weeks of military and political reverses seem to have left the Bush administration doing little more in Iraq than grasping at ways to make it past November's presidential election without getting American troops caught in a civil war. At times, the only unifying theme for Washington's policies seems to be desperation.'
(New York Times editorial, 'America Adrift in Iraq', May 15)

'We are looking into the abyss.'
(General Joseph Hoar, former commander-in-chief of US Central Command, to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.)

Fully 21 months ago, when this columnist first realised the Bush regime was going to invade Iraq and said so in this space, a Jamaican friend sophisticated in international affairs phoned me. 'Do you realise,' he said, 'these people are going to wind up causing the fall of the Saudi sheiks?'

He meant that the radicalisation of the Arab world by the sight of the US imperial legions encamped in the heart of Islam would be such that in due course no secularist Muslim regime would survive it. And beyond that was the doomsday scenario he didn't want to name: the global catastrophe if political instability in Saudi Arabia curtailed the world's supply of oil.

With oil prices skyrocketing last week, and a slew of alarmed articles on the subject appearing in many of the major Western newspapers, I thought of him.
In the Guardian Julian Borger wrote that, 'traditional conservatives who see American interests in the Middle East as focused on a regular supply of oil are anxious because it has pulled its troops out of one big
producer, Saudi Arabia, without establishing a sustainable military presence in another, Iraq'. And in a major article ('Power and vainglory, same paper, May 19), John Gray, professor of European thought at LSE and author of a book on al-Qaeda, expanded in grim detail, and grimmer prognoses, on the same theme.

Gray sees the US attack on Iraq as being in part a 'resource war': the Bush regime needed to pull out of Saudi Arabia 'which had come to be seen as complicit with terror and inherently unstable', and needed a safe source of oil.
The problem is, Gray writes, 'The Americans did more than overthrow Saddam's despotic regime; they also destroyed the Iraqi state, an essentially Western regime'. In doing so, they 'empowered radical Islam' in Iraq, and, at a global level, al-Qaeda, 'now a more serious threat than it has ever been.' [As I write this, Friday morning, CNN is reporting an FBI US-wide alert against the threat of suicide bombings. WB.]

Anticipating by a day the prediction of General Abizaid, head of the US Central Command, that violence in Iraq is going to escalate even further, Gray expects Western oil companies to leave - 'Where will that leave Iraq, and its oil?' - and notes they're already leaving Saudi Arabia, where forces linked to al-Qaeda have stepped up their attacks. He concludes that 'the impact [on the price of oil] of a major upheaval in the kingdom would be incalculable'.
Gray was prescient in another way, too: his warning that the immediate winner from the chaos unleashed on Iraq is sure to be Iran came just a day before US forces raided the home of Ahmed Chalabi.

Now, Chalabi has long been the darling of the neo-cons. Convicted of fraud by Jordan, he was nonetheless picked up by vice-president Cheney, who first used him to funnel false information to the White House on Iraq's supposed WMD, and then airlifted him into Iraq with his very own little army in the naïve expectation of installing him as their puppet president. Once Saddam's regime was toppled, Paul Bremer dutifully appointed Chalabi to the Iraqi Governing Council.
But Chalabi's WMD intelligence was soon exposed as having been fabricated; and when, many months later, the Bush regime in desperation called on the UN's Lakhdar Brahimi to select a post-June 30 Iraqi interim government, Brahimi excluded the members of the IGC. Whereupon, in bitter disappointment, Mr Chalabi started biting the hand that had so generously been feeding him.

He demanded full, not partial, sovereignty for Iraq. He led defiant demands by the IGC to be included in - indeed, to comprise - the interim government. It appears he went even further and began passing classified US military information to the Iranian government. For that, his home was raided and documents seized - though Chalabi claims, of course, it was merely done to punish him for 'standing up' to Bremer.

Chalabi's fate is unimportant. But his recent actions suggest that the canny crook understands, as Gray points out, that the Iranian hardliners are the immediate winners from the chaos in Iraq. And that is certain to enrage (1) the Israelis, who pre-emptively bombed Iran in the early 80s (2) most of the Arab world, which is predominantly Sunni, and (3) the Baathists recently restored to power in Fallujah by the commander of US forces retreating from that city - with all the incentive for an Iraqi civil war which that implies.
Writes Gray scathingly: 'The Bush administration's self-defeating approach to terrorism meant overthrowing many, if not most, of the area's regimes and replacing them with secular liberal democracies. They appear not to have noticed that in the Middle East today democracy means Islamist rule.'

Indeed, Gray believes the US will soon have no choice but to withdraw from Iraq - and that the Bush regime is even now preparing to declare victory and pull out.
(I myself am not so sure - though Gray's piece reminded me of an odd little blip on the radar earlier last week, when, in the space of a couple days, both Colin Powell and Paul Bremer separately conceded that, if asked to depart by the new Iraqi interim administration, US forces would indeed depart. Both men said, of course, that they couldn't imagine that happening; and the secretary of state was immediately contradicted - poor Colin - by one General Sharp, director of strategic plans for the US military's joint staff, who said an Iraqi pull-out request would not be valid unless it were made by an elected government. But I have to admit it would be a canny way for Mr Bush to wash his hands of Iraq prior to November 4. Install an interim government, get them to demand a US withdrawal, and then proceed to comply, with much ballyhoo about the Bush administration respecting the wishes of sovereign Iraq and blah blah blah.)

However, the White House spins such a withdrawal, Gray writes, 'the rest of the world will recognise it as a humiliating defeat - and it is here that the analogy of Vietnam is inadequate. The Iraq war has been lost far more quickly than that in South-east Asia, and the impact on the world is potentially much greater. Whereas Vietnam had little economic significance, Iraq is pivotal in the world economy. No dominoes fell with the fall of Saigon, but some pretty weighty ones could be shaken as the American tanks rumble out of Baghdad'.
In fact, they're already shaking; and not just in the Middle East.

1) The Pentagon's sudden decision last week to bolster its Iraq legions by redeploying 3,600 US troops from forward positions in South Korea was widely seen in that country as punishment for the South's delay in committing its promised contingent of troops to Iraq. But, writes Donald Kirk (Christian Science Monitor, May 20), 'it has [also] led many analysts [in South Korea to believe] that the US will ultimately give up its commitment to South Korea's defence'. This uncertainty, which comes at a time when the South Korean government is pursuing a rapprochement with the north, in the face of pressure from South Korean conservatives to desist, seems likely to strengthen the hardliners' hand.
It's worth recalling that North Korea has the bomb.

2) The Associated Press reported on Friday that US troops in Afghanistan had crossed over into Pakistan. In light of his generals' strong anti-US sentiment, Pakistan's beleagured Musharraf has had no choice but to refuse US troops the right to pursue guerrillas on his territory. Yet this was the second incursion in a month. Pakistan filed a formal protest after the first (and is certain to do so again); and the US State Department apologised.
It may simply have to go on apologising and encroaching. With the wreckage of the Iraq adventure on his hands, Mr Bush and his campaign must realise
their last hope for another four years may lie in capturing or killing bin Laden, and the rapturous celebrations such a feat would doubtless unleash among the US electorate. And as November 4 approaches, and neo-con desperation increases, so will their reckless incursions into Pakistan. The worst-case scenario is, of course, that they will so fuel Pakistani anger that Musharraf is deposed - after which, the joker there will really be wild.
Pakistan, of course, has the bomb.

3) China last week startlingly warned Taiwan's re-elected president that it would use force if necessary to keep Taiwan part of China - whatever the consequences. Said Xu Shiquan, one of China's senior advisers on Taiwan affairs: 'China will pay any price to prevent [Taiwanese] independence.' No one at all familiar with Chinese history and Chinese culture will mistake that 'any price' for a bluff.
Let the reader understand: for decades, the US has pledged to defend Taiwan if it's ever attacked by China. But in Iraq Mr Bush has so undercut the image of American power that in the big league - the really big league - the mortal game of 'Chicken' may have begun.

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