From the Washington Post:
“It’s a race against time because by the end of this coming summer we can no longer sustain the presence we have now,” said retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who visited Iraq most recently in May and briefed Cheney, Rice and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This thing, the wheels are coming off it.”
From Georgie Anne Geyer
“Iran, if things continue to go its way, finds itself on the threshold of controlling vast oil resources that stretch from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean … Iran is well on its way to achieving de facto control of significant portions of Iraq. Teheran is backing Shia cleric the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (a Persian, not an Arab) and the radical Muqtada al-Sadr. The Iranians are funneling money and training to supporters inside Iraq. The Iraqi Shia control the political process and comprise the majority of the security forces … Iran is in a dominant position in Lebanon. The murder earlier this year of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has left Lebanon under the de facto military guard of Hezbollah. Iran remains the main benefactor, supporter and adviser to Hezbollah …” [See also my comment at Politics Plus Stuff.]
Then from the New York Times by DEXTER FILKINS we get the following:
In 28 months of war and occupation here, Iraq has always contained two parallel worlds: the world of the Green Zone and the constitution and the rule of law; and the anarchical, unpredictable world outside.
Never have the two worlds seemed so far apart.
From the beginning, the hope here has been that the Iraq outside the Green Zone would grow to resemble the safe and tidy world inside it; that the success of democracy would begin to drain away the anger that pushes the insurgency forward. This may have been what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was referring to when, in an interview published in Time magazine this month, she said that the insurgency was “losing steam” and that “rather quiet political progress” was transforming the country.
But in this third summer of war, the American project in Iraq has never seemed so wilted and sapped of life. It’s not just the guerrillas, who are churning away at their relentless pace, attacking American forces about 65 times a day. It is most everything else, too.
Baghdad seems a city transported from the Middle Ages: a scattering of high-walled fortresses, each protected by a group of armed men. The area between the forts is a lawless no man’s land, menaced by bandits and brigands. With the daytime temperatures here hovering at around 115 degrees, the electricity in much of the city flows for only about four hours a day.
But everything is not beyond hope. G. W. Bush has become aware there is a problem. Thanks to Mark Kleiman who pointed out what I missed earlier, we learn about this new initiative in the White House to focus on the main priorities in Iraq. From the Washington Post we learn:
“At his meeting with his war cabinet yesterday, Bush reviewed the latest developments but reported no new direction. The administration has set up seven interagency groups focused on its main priorities in Iraq. These are providing security and training Iraqi forces, building national political institutions, restoring energy and other services, tackling economic problems, establishing rule of law, enlisting international help, and improving strategic communications.”
See? It isn’t hopeless! G. W. Bush has become aware that there is some level of difficulty in Iraq, so he has taken action. He has actually set up seven interagency groups which are to focus on the main priorities in Iraq. I guess he just wasn’t given the word anytime in the last two-plus years we have had troops fighting inside Iraq. As soon as he learned there was a problem he took ACTION! He created interagency groups! See? All is not lost!!