Violence in Baghdad was "a last gasp" of Islamic extremists?

Thus said Sec Def Robert Gates Tuesday evening on the PBS News Hour, and evidently some Obama administration people were quick to say that he made a mistake. As this McClatchy report notes, some see him as channeling Dick Cheney's unfortunate, extremely unprophetic remark in 2005 that the Sunni insurgency was in its "last throes."

My own small voice has over the last months been but one of many (including much bigger voices, happy to say) to suggest that the pronouncements of "victory" in Iraq (by the Kagans and others in the wake of the Surge) were way too premature. The McClatchy piece delineates very well the major fault lines in Iraq: Sunni Arab vs. Kurds in the north, with the mostly Shiite security forces willing to lie back and let the Kurds pound the Sunnis; and those same security forces in the south vs. what remains of a Sunni resistance. That group would include al-Qaeda in Iraq remnants - whose ranks may swell as US forces leave the cities in accordance with the SOFA agreement with the al-Maliki government - as well as Awakening Council militias, members of which the Maliki-government's security forces have been rounding up and harrassing for months now, with the backing of US troops - which may make US troops targets again as well. Indeed, 5 US troops were killed by a car bomb in Mosul yesterday (and factor in as well that AQI groups are not often well disposed toward the Sunni Awakening. Today, about 25 miles south of Baghdad, several Awakening members were killed by a suicide bomber, likely AQI). The consensus seems to be that the Iraqi forces are a long way from being ready to take on the forces that are already arrayed against them.

And let's not forget that thousands of members of the Mahdi Army may be lying low and waiting to act against any perceived provocation. As the MSM tout the success of the Surge, they tend to forget that (a) part of that success was due to Muqtada al-Sadr's instruction to his followers to stand down in their resistance to Maliki's army, and (b) parts of Sadr City, the mostly Shiite impoverished slum in Baghdad, were walled off (with those humongous concrete blast walls) by the US forces, which then expended considerable effort in keeping those walls guarded and pretty well plugged. What happens when the US forces withdraw from Baghdad over the next few months? And if the Iraqi forces are able to keep those walls up and that part of Baghdad therefore segregated, how long will it take to complete a reconciliation process that would make it possible for those walls to come down? And that simply has to happen at some point. No country can be called stable or a success when one portion of its capital has to be walled off from another.

I'll say it again . . . prepare to see in the weeks ahead a lot of neocons and US military honchos demanding that Obama in effect discard the withdrawal timetable agreed upon in the SOFA agreement, in order to "preserve the gains" made in Iraq and ensure that the sacrifices of the US military over the past 6 years will not have been "in vain." The impact of a wihdrawal slowdown in Iraq on Obama's plans for Afghanistan will be significant, of course. What remains to be seen is the impact such a slowdown will have in Iraq itself. But at the least, it will strengthen the impression of the US as a long-term occupier of Iraq, it will weaken Obama's diplomatic outreach to Iran (whose leaders do not want to see the US military presence next door extended - but the Netanyahu government in Israel might welcome this), and it may fatally undercut the Maliki government by labeling it as nothing more than a US puppet/proxy regime.

Reports of Hezbollah ring plotting against Egypt

Some interesting reports coming out of Israel and Egypt about alleged Iran/Hezbollah terror plans vs. Egypt. On the other hand, a noted Egyptian expert on Islamist groups (Diaa Rashwaan) says that these allegations are politically motivated, and says that Hezbollah has been confining its activities to Lebanon.

I'm inclined to heed the Egyptian expert's warnings. The established Arab regimes (dictatorships, really) in the region have set up the Iranians as a bogeyman for several years now (I think, for example, of King Abdullah of Jordan's fulminations about the impending doom to be caused by the "Shiite Crescent" led by Iran). Innocents? No. But intent on launching terror attacks against Egypt? But if Egypt wants to accuse Iran of such dirty work, you can be sure that the Israeli press will be happy to provide a bullhorn to get that news to the West.

I'll be curious to see how much play this gets in the US MSM.

A paid political announcement by the Likud party

The following is a paid political announcement by the Likud party and the government of Israel.

No, not really, but it might as well be. Remember, this is by Elliot Abrams, the "rehabilitated" Iran-Contra criminal who held the Middle East brief on Bush's National Security Council. He argues here that, what the hell, the Jewish settlements are up, so leave them alone - and let 'em keep building! They're not hurting the Palestinians, says he.

And this clown has a seat in the Council on Foreign Relations?!

And, on a related note - with some shameless self-promotion - for those of you who read Spanish, you'll find yours truly quoted (along with Mr. Abrams - and Patrick Seale; much better company, he) in an article in this week's edition of Semana, Colombia's top weekly news magazine.

The Settlement Freeze Fallacy

By Elliott Abrams
Wednesday, April 8, 2009; A17

Will Israel's new government face American demands for a settlement freeze? If so, we are headed for a needless confrontation with the Netanyahu cabinet.

There is wide consensus that the main obstacle to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is settlement activity -- new construction in the communities beyond the "Green Line," as the border of Israel from the 1949 armistice until the 1967 war is known. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has called settlement activity "the greatest obstacle" to peace, former president George W. Bush called it an "impediment" to peace, and the international "quartet" -- the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations -- has criticized settlement activity in virtually all of its joint statements.

There is also wide agreement on the antidote: a "settlement freeze," imposed to make peace possible. Consider: In a speech in Washington last February, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said that "what is most desperately required is a cessation of all settlement activity in order to preserve the very possibility of a negotiated two-state solution." The 2001 Mitchell Report said Israel should "freeze all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements," a conclusion that gained more importance when George Mitchell, the former senator who wrote the report, was named President Obama's Middle East negotiator.

Certainly the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank after 1967 (by Labor and Likud governments) created conditions that complicate negotiations. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis now live beyond the Green Line, and the intense debate in Israel over then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's removal of fewer than 9,000 settlers from Gaza suggests that removing settlements from the West Bank will be even more controversial and difficult.

But those settlements exist, and there is no point in debating whether it was right to build them. President Bush largely resolved the issue of the major settlement blocs in a 2004 letter to Sharon. He stated a truth that Palestinians have come to recognize: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities."

So the real issue is not past settlement activity but the demand for a settlement freeze. Is current and recent settlement construction creating insurmountable barriers to peace? A simple test shows that it is not. Ten years ago, in the Camp David talks, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat approximately 94 percent of the West Bank, with a land swap to make up half of the 6 percent Israel would keep. According to news reports, just three months ago, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered 93 percent, with a one-to-one land swap. In the end, under the January 2009 offer, Palestinians would have received an area equal to 98 to 98.5 percent of the West Bank (depending on which press report you read), while 10 years ago they were offered 97 percent. Ten years of settlement activity would have resulted in a larger area for the Palestinian state.

How is this possible? For one thing, most settlement activity is in those major blocs that it is widely understood Israel will keep. For another, those settlements are becoming more populated, not geographically larger. Most settlement expansion occurs in ways that do not much affect Palestinian life. While the physical expansion of settlements may take land that Palestinians own or use, and may interfere with Palestinian mobility or agricultural activity, population growth inside settlements does not have that effect. For the past five years, Israel's government has largely adhered to guidelines that were discussed with the United States but never formally adopted: that there would be no new settlements, no financial incentives for Israelis to move to settlements and no new construction except in already built-up areas. The clear purpose of the guidelines? To allow for settlement growth in ways that minimized the impact on Palestinians.

Israel has largely, but not fully, kept to those rules; there has been physical expansion in some places, and the Palestinian Authority is right to object to it. Israeli settlement expansion beyond the security fence, in areas Israel will ultimately evacuate, is a mistake: It wastes Israeli resources and needlessly antagonizes the Palestinians who live nearby. But the overall impact of such recent activity -- as Olmert's proposal to Abbas showed -- has not undermined Israel's ability to negotiate peace and offer a territorial compromise.

Settlement activity is not diminishing the territory of a future Palestinian entity. In fact, the emphasis on a "settlement freeze" draws attention from the progress that's needed to lay the foundation for full Palestinian self-rule -- building a thriving economy, fighting terrorism through reliable security forces and establishing the rule of law. A "settlement freeze" would not help Palestinians face today's problems or prepare for tomorrow's challenges. The demand for a freeze would have only one quick effect: to create immediate tension between the United States and Israel's new government. That may be precisely why some propose it, but it is also why the Obama administration should reject it.

The writer, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was the deputy national security adviser overseeing Near East and North African affairs in the George W. Bush administration.

Some encouraging signs about Obama, Israel, and Iran

Today's LA Times reports that V-P Joe Biden has warned Netanyahu off attacking Iran. Biden is known for making statements that he's sometimes had to back away from, but I have to believe that on an issue as important and contentious as this, he made this statement only with due consultation with, and approval from, his boss. If Netanyahu were to authorize a strike against Israel at this point, he'd be doing so without any green light from the US. Of course, in case he decided to go ahead and launch a strike anyway, he may be counting on the ability of the Israel Lobby [and yes, my friends, let's dispense with any more pretense on this score. It does exist, so let's call it what it is] to rally support in Congress and among the American public to come to Israel's rescue. That would amount to a humongous game of chicken, with the planet's stability the stakes.

And I'm just as encouraged by the news of the Iran experts that Messrs. Holbrooke and Ross are bringing on board: respectively, Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh, both of them respected analysts who have long advocated engaging Iran over attacking Iran.

Some big lines are being drawn in the sand, by the leaders of two countries who have professed themselves to be each other's strongest allies. Of course, it's right about now that we can expect Mr. Ahmadinejad to do or say something stupidly inflammatory. Here's hoping that the Ayatollah Khamenei has him on a short leash right now.

Netanyahu wants peace without a Palestinian state

A non-affirmation affirmation from Israel - along with more evidence of Tony Blair's irrelevance. Netanyahu will never agree to a Palestinian state. President Obama has a major problem here; one more for an already sky-high pile.

Might Pakistan come apart?

Interestingly, Juan Cole at Informed Comment has been trying to reassure his readers that Pakistan is actually in no real danger of coming apart. Analyses such as this onesurely call that into question. What I can certainly envision as a real possibility is an attempted military take-over - something to which Pakistan has become all too accustomed over the years since its creation in 1947. And when you have a character as corrupt and indecisive as Asif Ali Zardari (widower of Benazir Bhutto, who for all of the glorification of her after her assassination was not exactly a model of transparency in democracy) as president, all the more reason for the military to step in if the situation spirals downward even more. However, the pro-democracy feeling has burgeoned among Pakistan's middle class, who will likely not respond well to a military coup. The likely consequence would be urban demonstrations and rioting in Islamabad and elsewhere, as well as a dangerously discomfited India.

How all this might spill out beyond Pakistan would have, of course, a major impact on Mr. Obama's plans for Afghanistan and eliminating al-Qaeda.

A Saner Approach to Iran's nuclear enrichment

The Financial Times reports that the Obama administration may "cede to Iran's nuclear ambition" by more or less acceding to its pursuit of nuclear enrichment - which, let's face it, they've been doing for years, and to which they're entitled according to the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (to which Iran, but not Israel, is a signatory). That the Netanyahu government will go along with this is doubtful, to say the least. Netanyahu's upcoming visit to Washington in May looms ever more important,

Afghanistan = Vietnam?

The respected conservative commentator Georgie Anne Geyer thinks so, among others - and as I've noted earlier, I'd have to agree. Don't get me wrong. I am, all in all, a big fan of Mr. Obama, and hope that I can remain so. But I fear that he's biting off more than he - or we - can chew, in Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

There's a famous aphorism from the Vietnam war, about how the US would sometimes have to "destroy a hamlet so that we could save it." The more I read about the impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan, the more that aphorism haunts my thinking. I hope the "surge" now in process in Afghanistan will succeed, but let's all try to keep in mind that, despite the inferences published by Fred Kagan and the American Enterprise Institute, there's no evidence to prove that General Petraeus can indeed walk on water. Nor, despite the best efforts of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to make the case, could General Maxwell Taylor or General William Westmoreland.

SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES IN AFGHANISTAN

By Georgie Anne Geyer Thu Apr 2, 7:57 pm ET

WASHINGTON -- As President Obama and his advisers focus on Europe, Russia and the international economy at the G20 summit, a slowly bleeding wound on the body of American foreign policy is becoming increasingly infected -- and will, in the end, seriously poison his presidency.

The wound is Afghanistan. Its present situation reminds those of us who remember Vietnam of those days in the '60s when minds in Washington were elsewhere -- on the nuclear standoff with Russia in Cuba, on President Kennedy's death, on the civil rights fight -- as we quietly kept sending more and more troops to replace the French in Indo-China.

What we hear from those faraway Afghan mountains and villages, which have voraciously devoured every foreign conqueror for hundreds of years, is that the Taliban is growing in influence. (It is al-Qaida and the Taliban we blame for the 9/11 attack, of course.)

The Taliban is now right outside the capital of Kabul, and young correspondents and aid workers who have covered the war tell me unanimously that they no longer can move around the country without guards. (One of the best, a dark-haired, handsome young American, has now grown a beard and wears Afghan dress whenever he leaves his hotel.)

Moreover, this very week, Taliban fighters struck for the first time outside of their protective tribal areas into Pakistan proper -- into the country's most populous state of Punjab and into that elegant ancient city of Lahore, in an eight-hour attack on the police institute that was only confusedly defeated. A warning.

Yet, even while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking a week ago in The Hague, called the waste of aid money already spent in Afghanistan "heartbreaking," the administration is going to forge ahead, planning to send some 900 new civilian personnel to the country, among other changes. This, despite the fact that foreign civilian personnel have become "the" target of the Taliban and other indiscriminate killers, many of them in the fight only to fight foreigners!

Is this wise? I don't think so. There is the same feeling in Afghanistan today that there was in Saigon in 1968, '69 and '70, when I was there -- that despite all our outward manifestations of military and technological power, the Viet Cong were sneaking up on us from all sides. In fact, it was, just as the Taliban is today.

But to back up momentarily to the decision-making process: Bill Gertz, one of Washington's most astute journalistic voices and investigators, wrote recently in The Washington Times that the Obama administration was initially divided on what to do, after eight long and ambivalent years, on Afghanistan. Vice President Joseph Biden and others argued in closed-door meetings for a "minimal strategy of stabilizing Afghanistan," focusing on the main military objective of denying safe haven to the terrorists.

A second group, led by special regional envoy Richard Holbrooke and supported by Secretary Clinton, fought for "a major nation-building effort." The latter won, and we are now, Gertz wrote, embarked on a "major, long-term military and civilian program to reinvent Afghanistan from one of the most backward, least-developed nations to a relatively prosperous democratic state."

And so, they are most probably placing us firmly back into the pattern of America's unfortunate lost wars. As Bill Lind, one of our most impressive military historians (he wrote the Marine Corps' small-wars manual in earlier years), says: "The error, one that no tactical operational successes can overcome, is setting unattainable strategic objectives. Short of divine intervention, nothing can turn Afghanistan into a modern, prosperous, democratic state."

Then he adds, revealingly: "Here we see how little 'change' the Obama administration really represents. The differences between the neo-liberals (the Obama-ites) and the neocons (the conservatives who got the Bush administration into the Iraq and Afghan wars) are few. Both are militant believers in Brave New World, a Globalist future in which everyone on earth becomes modern. ... Meanwhile, the money is running out. The 'ancien regime' syndrome looms ever larger: We not only maintain, but increase, foolish foreign commitments."

Another extremely well-informed columnist on the region and veteran of the Congo and Vietnam and innumerable other conflicts, Arnaud de Borchgrave, writes in his United Press International column of how Pakistan's always-secretive and endlessly intrusive intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, has in part supported the Taliban, at the same time it was supposedly working with us. "Pakistan's geopolitical calculus," he writes, "shows NATO followed by the United States succumbing to the Vietnam syndrome -- and the Taliban prevailing."

What is now taking form, then, is an Afghanistan that could steadily be taken over by the Taliban. More Americans there, particularly unprotected civilians, mean more targets of opportunity. (The Americans who volunteer are most often our very best people -- that is not the question.) Meanwhile, Pakistan could become Talibanized, rendered essentially helpless or radicalized itself.

But these are details -- THEIR details. What about OURS? Our big question is an overarching historic one. Are we going to continue to bleed ourselves in countries we are trying to transform in our image? Our history of unnecessary lost wars and fruitless interventions -- from Vietnam, to Somalia, to Haiti and others -- may not show up immediately, but they are there, underlying and poisoning everything. In Afghanistan, we could have, from the beginning, dealt with al-Qaida and the Taliban as a police and intelligence action, realizing both their limits and our own. Instead, we are trying, nobly but ultimately foolishly, to build a "city on the hill" in sand. Again.

"New" book on the Armenian Genocide

A review of a "new" book on the Armenian genocide appears today in the WaPo. Mr. Obama will likely be made aware of it as he travels to Turkey, where the issue is sure to be raised. There's a lot riding on how he deals with it.

A Deadly Time Brought to Life

By Chris Bohjalian
Sunday, April 5, 2009; B01

ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA
By Grigoris Balakian
Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag
Knopf. 509 pp. $35

Last month, while I was visiting my father in Florida, we had dinner one night with my aunt. We were discussing the way Jim Jones had poisoned 900 of his followers with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid in 1978, and suddenly my aunt was explaining that another way to poison someone is with a yogurt smoothie. "That's how the Turks poisoned your grandmother's classmates in Constantinople in 1915," she said. "They poisoned the tahn."

This story was new to me, and I am 47. But as a second-generation Armenian American, I've found that it's not uncommon for one of these UFO horror stories to materialize out of nowhere over coffee. My childhood was a combination of suburban cliché and Middle Eastern exoticism. Although most of my boyhood in New York's Westchester County revolved around Little League baseball, "Star Trek" and coveting my older brother's record collection, there was also the powerfully alien aura cast by my grandparents, Leo and Haigoohi (pronounced Hi-Gui) Bohjalian. They emigrated to the United States from Paris in 1927, though both had been born near Constantinople just after the turn of the last century. I saw them weekly, either at our home (a development Colonial) or theirs (a three-story brick house that in my memory is a mansion, but that I imagine would strike me as rather modest if I were to revisit it now).

My grandparents spoke a strange language, the characters that formed the words in their books were impenetrable, and my grandfather used to wear a suit with a vest, even on Saturday afternoons. He would play his beloved oud for hours. Their sheer foreignness drove my father crazy, and he worked hard to be more American than a Ford motor plant. In hindsight, I shouldn't be surprised that he entered one of the more iconic American professions of the middle part of the 20th century: advertising.

But there was also something tragic about Leo and Haigoohi. Though no one ever told me the precise circumstances, I knew that three of their four parents had died in the genocide of 1915, and Leo -- who had left Turkey -- went back after World War I to find Haigoohi. Sometimes I was told that she had been hidden by a Muslim family, other times that she had found shelter in a convent.

Still, my father never spoke of what may have happened to his ancestors in 1915, and as a boy I never asked. And so their story emerges in unexpected, fitful thunderstorms -- such as my aunt's yogurt smoothie story last month.

Now, in a powerful memoir being published for the first time in English, I may finally be getting an inkling of what Leo and Haigoohi's parents endured in the Armenian nightmare of 1915-16. Originally published in 1922, "Armenian Golgotha" is Father Grigoris Balakian's account of his deportation from Constantinople with 250 other Armenian intellectual and political leaders on April 24, 1915 -- now Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day -- and the cruelties he endured over the next three years as he struggled to survive. Roughly 1.2 million Armenians would either be slaughtered by Turkish killing squads or would die of exposure or starve to death in camps in the deserts at the southeastern edges of the Ottoman Empire. Balakian was a great-uncle of the poet and memoirist Peter Balakian, who translated this account with Aris Sevag.

The book presents a litany of barbaric savageries: the mobile killing squads (chetes) of pardoned Turkish criminals; the endless caravans of starving women and children; the grisly decapitations and dismemberments of unarmed Armenians by frenzied mobs using "axes, hatchets, shovels, and pitchforks." Balakian shares it all in a tone that vacillates between reportorial numbness and a grim determination to live to tell the world what he has witnessed: "On our second day . . . we saw, in the fields on both sides of the road, the first decomposed human skeletons and even more skulls, long hair still attached to them, leaving no doubt that they belonged to females. Among our companions were young Armenian intellectuals . . . . They often bent down to pick up the skulls and kiss them."

When Balakian asks the Turkish captain guarding them why the victims hadn't been buried, he's informed that they had been tossed into a mass grave, but the winter floods had washed away the dirt. Then the captain adds offhandedly that these were the bones of some of the 86,000 Armenians who had been "put on this road so that we could cleanse them." (The word "cleanse" as a euphemism for genocide appears often in the text, as does the word "jihad," giving the account an eerie and disturbing contemporaneousness.)

Balakian eventually escapes from the caravan, using his fluency in German to pass in a variety of guises, including that of a German engineer.

In addition to being a poignant, often harrowing story about the resiliency of the human spirit, "Armenian Golgotha" is also a window on a moment in history that most Americans only dimly understand. Despite the enormous amount of new scholarship into the genocide (including work by Turkish scholars), some Americans view the killings as less calculated than the Holocaust and wonder whether the event should even be categorized as "genocide" -- especially at the risk of antagonizing Turkey, a NATO ally. (Exhibit A? The current debate over a possible U.S. House resolution that actually places the words "Armenian" and "genocide" side by side.) In some people's eyes, particularly those who wish to deny what really happened, the Armenian ordeal was a series of chaotic, decentralized, non-bureaucratic massacres -- the opposite of the systematic, state-centralized, bureaucratic slaughter of 6 million in the Holocaust. Balakian's account, however, is rich with evidence of the Turkish government's complicity and its leaders' premeditation. Deportation, in their vernacular, was always a subterfuge for extermination.

So I hope that "Armenian Golgotha" will be widely read, both as a riveting tale of one man's survival and as a historical document.

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 11 novels, including "Midwives" and "The Double Bind."

Iraq: Is it over? Not by a long shot!

And what will the US do when the pot starts to boil and the lid starts to pop off?

A correspondent for The National files a riveting account of a truly scary expedition into the Jihad section of Baghdad, ending with a scary car chase that ends, happily for her, with the reporter reaching an Iraqi army checkpoint before she's caught by scary guys in balaclavas. And this is inside Baghdad, not in the boonies. That such accounts have become so rare of late may not be as much a reflection of an improved situation as of the diminished number of journalists covering Iraq now. After all, "we" have won there, because - haven't you heard? - the Surge worked.

Except that we're no closer now to a political reconciliation than we were a year ago. Kirkuk's ultimate disposition (in Kurdistan, or under Baghdad's - i.e., Arab - control?) is still up for grabs. Mosul is seeing bombings and killing every day. The Sunni sahwa/"Awakening"/Sons of Iraq militias are both running scared from the Iraqi army (comprised as it is of mostly Shiite militia members; no love lost there) and preparing to repel them, along with their US back-ups - their erstwhile patrons and paymasters who, now in their eyes, have betrayed them to the not-so-tender mercies of Mr. al-Maliki. And if need be - and if the price is right - some of them will hook up again with members of the anti-occupation resistance, as well as al-Qaeda jihadists.

Meanwhile, reports are that some disaffected elements of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army are lying low, waiting for the US troops to leave Baghdad and other cities (as they are enjoined to do - by end of this July - according to the SOFA concluded at the end of Bush's tenure) before they reassert themselves.

Mr. al-Maliki seems to feel increasingly confident that his security forces can deal with any and all internal threats without US help (even if he has no Iraqi air force or air cover to speak of - which means he will need to rely indeed on US air cover, just as in the 1920s and 1930s Iraq's king Faisal had to count on the RAF as he worked to keep his fractious new nation together). But, let's face it: Barring divine or extraterrestrial intervention in the next several months, the pilot light for re-igniting the fires beneath Iraq's ethnic and sectarian cauldron will be burning steadily when US forces pull out of Iraq's cities. There are going to be "incidents" - and calls for revenge and settling of still unsettled scores. Will the US be able to walk away?

(A brief but necessary digression: Is Mr. Netanyahu counting on the US troops to walk away? Reports from the Israeli press are that, unless the US forces Iran to back down from its nuclear enrichment program, he intends to launch a military strike against Iran in summer 2010, with the understanding that many US troops will have left Iraq by then and will therefore be less in harm's way from any Iranian response.)

Or, if not, will the US be able to carry on with its planned "surge" of forces into an increasingly less stable "Af-Pak" theater?

Finally, someone writes of the US's moral obligation to Iraq

Tom Ricks at the Foreign Policy website has an excellent post about the recent fighting in Baghdad between government forces (backed by US military) and the Sunni "Sons of Iraq" militias. Specifically, he produces part of a note from retired Col. Pete Mansoor (who was Gen. Petraeus' exec. officer during most of the "Surge"), who is disturbed by the possibility that US troops may indeed wind up taking on these militia who so recently had worked with the US.

But I'm especially struck by Ricks' inclusion of an analysis from Ali Wyne of the Carnegie Endowment, who writes in no uncertain terms about the moral obligations that Americans - be they pro-withdrawal or pro-occupation - owes Iraqis at this point:

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is shifting its focus back to Afghanistan now that the war in Iraq has been won. The suggestion -- which has, by now, been internalized in mainstream discourse -- that the surge of American troops into Baghdad has been a success is dubious on two grounds.

First, there are factual difficulties. A September 2008 report by researchers at UCLA found that "violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning." They concluded, therefore, that "the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved." That is, the surge occurred after the tinderbox that it was intended to eliminate had mostly been defused. Furthermore, according to a recent wire story, the apparent stability in Baghdad results from "fear," which "keeps the peace."

Second, there are moral considerations. Approximately five million Iraqis, or 20% of the Iraqi population, have been displaced from their homes; Human Rights Watch reports that "no structure exists to meet [their] humanitarian needs." According to recent statistics, 88% of Iraqis do not have access to electricity; 70% do not have access to clean water (a new report found that 36% of Baghdad's drinking water is unsafe); and 43% live on less than a dollar a day. One in five Iraqi women suffers physical violence, and one in three Iraqi children is hungry. It strains credulity to suggest that victory has been achieved in Iraq even though the country's social services apparatus is dysfunctional, most Iraqis cannot access basic provisions, and the rule of fear substitutes for the rule of law. Because the surge "is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state," concluded a respected analyst, "the recent short-term gains [in stability] have come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq."

The dichotomous debate over Iraq -- one side supports (even if tacitly) indefinite occupation on the grounds that a full-scale civil war will erupt if the United States withdraws prematurely; the other supports a phased withdrawal of American troops from Iraq on the grounds that the occupation is increasingly a strategic liability - excludes moral considerations. Members of the former camp should ask themselves: is it right for the United States to stay in Iraq if it does not accord at least as much priority to the welfare of Iraqis as it does to its own strategic interests? Members of the latter camp should ask themselves: given how greatly Iraqis have suffered as a result of the war, is it principled for the United States to abdicate its humanitarian obligations to them under the banner of "ending the occupation?" Although each camp claims the moral high ground, the reality is that they both avoid the considerations that must underlie any moral posture.

Can Iraq survive a US withdrawal?

Juan Cole at Informed Comment spots a couple of reports that, to my mind, are very worrying about Iraq's future after US forces depart - or even as they are drawing down.

First, there are still areas (the NYT report calls them "pockets") of Iraq where violence is ongoing, hardly sporadic. As you read the account, it's clear that US troops are still taking the lead in some of the more dangerous tasks, and that people's lives are still very much at risk.

Ten yards in front of him, an Iraqi soldier was inspecting a possible booby trap in a desolate village deserted long ago.

“You never know what he is playing with,” said Corporal Buck, 27, his eyes squarely on the soldier.

Moments later, an explosion rang out less than a half-mile away. An unsuspecting Iraqi had detonated a pressure-triggered roadside bomb. His legs were ripped off, and after a brief struggle for air, he died in the dirt.

Meanwhile, across the country (or at least the non-Kurdistan portion of it), people are still struggling with terrible infrastructure - lack of water for even the most basic tasks,

making something as simple as bathing a chore that requires extensive planning.

And they have little confidence that their newly elected local governments have the competence to do much about it. Little wonder. Corruption, bribes, nepotism, "patronage" - all have been frequently described as rampant in Iraq's local government. Combine that with the sharp decrease in revenues from the main source - oil - as oil prices have plummeted over the last year. The central government in Baghdad is having difficulty coming up with money for its own employees' salaries, including security forces.

And thousands remain unemployed, especially young men. One of the reports notes that 28 percent of young men ages 15 to 29 are unemployed. Many of them are former members of the Sunni "Awakening Council" militias, who were supposedly promised jobs from the government as they stood down from fighting al-Qaeda. That's not happening; indeed, many of them are afraid they'll be arrested by the (largely Shiite) security forces of Nuri al-Maliki's government. Many of them are going to be easy pickings - as in, ready recruits - for insurgent/resistance groups, including "al-Qaeda" jihadis. When you have no other means of support, it sometimes seems best to throw in with such groups, as much for a paycheck as anything else.

Tom Ricks is right. Iraq is not "over" - and as violence ramps up as US forces continue to pull back, the John McCain types are going to put tremendous pressure on Mr. Obama to crawl back through the loopholes in the status-of-forces agreement and keep a sizable US combat presence in Iraq so that the US can maintain its "honor" and US troops will not have "sacrificed in vain."

To pose General Petraeus' famous question again: Tell me how this ends?