Just FYI, I'm guest-blogging last week and this week over at Rolling Stone. Check it out here.

BBC is reporting an Iranian offer to have France set up nuclear processing plants on Iranian soil and both control and monitor the operation:

Iran has suggested that France monitor its nuclear programme, by setting up a nuclear fuel consortium inside Iran. ... The deputy director of Iran's atomic energy agency, Mohammad Saeedi, told French radio that a solution to the nuclear issue could be a consortium with France to enrich uranium in Iran. "That way France... could control in a tangible way our enrichment activities," Mohammad Saeedi, deputy chief of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told France-Info radio.

Sounds like a good solution to me. Of course, there are many others, too. There's nothing especially urgent about the Iranian nuke issue that makes it rise to the level of a crisis.

Sixty-five percent of Americans say that Iraq is already in a civil war.

Why is this important? Because those who insist we "stay the course" say that Iraq will fall into civil war if we leave. But if Americans think Iraq is already in a civil war (it is), then why stay? Good question.

Bill Frist, visiting Afghanistan, broke an important taboo: he suggested that "people who call themselves Taliban" be invited to join the Afghanistan government. Here's the AP story:

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and urged support for efforts to bring "people who call themselves Taliban" and their allies into the government. ...

He said the only way to win in places like the volatile southern part of the country is to "assimilate people who call themselves Taliban into a larger, more representative government."

"Approaching counterinsurgency by winning hearts and minds will ultimately be the answer," Frist said. "Military versus insurgency one-to-one doesn't sound like it can be won. It sounds to me ... that the Taliban is everywhere."

Now of course I am no fan of the Taliban. It's a Pakistan-backed, ultraconservative Muslim fundamentalist group that can only mean bad news for Afghans. But what's important here is that Frist is recognizing that the Taliban is not the same as Al Qaeda. (See, for instance, my recent piece for TomPaine.com, "There Is No War on Terror.") The so-called War on Terror (yes, I hate that term, too) ought to be aimed at Al Qaeda. So far, there is no evidence at all that AQ-type, foreign fighters have been involved in the Taliban-led insurgency in southern Afghanistan.

Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist in Iraq writing for Antiwar.com, reports on a new development in Iraq, namely, that the U.S. armed forces are arming and training Sunni militias. If true, it's a stunning new error, compounding past ones (disbanding the army, banning the Baath, empowering the religious Shiites, etc.). Here's a quote:

Reports of the setting-up of U.S.-backed Sunni militias have brought new uncertainty to deepening chaos within Iraq.

Some Sunni leaders from the troubled al-Anbar province west of Baghdad recently met away from their tribes to set up new militias, according to local reports.

These new armed groups have received early praise from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and U.S. officials. The United States had earlier called for the disarming of all militias for the sake of social peace and reconciliation, but that policy has clearly changed. The occupation forces now back both Shia and Sunni militias in different areas of the country.

Read the whole piece. It's a signal, and a dangerous one, that wittingly or unwittingly the United States is prepping Iraq for a much more violent civil war than the one that already exists.

I've got an analytical piece going up at TomPaine.com tomorrow about the Bush administration's loss of confidence in Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq, and it raises the question: Is the administration thinking about trying to "fix" Iraq by encouraging a coup d'etat by Iraq's armed forces?

Since then I had a conversation with a former CIA official with wide experience in the Middle East. Here's his take:

It's being talked about in Washington. One scenario is, the Iraqis do it themselves, some Iraqi colonel who's fed up with the whole thing, who takes over the country. And it would take the United States 48 hours to figure out how to respond, and meanwhile he's taken over everything.

The other side of the coin is, we do it ourselves, find some general up in Ramadi or somewhere, and help him take over. And he'd declare a state of emergency, and crack down. And he'd ask us to leave -- that would be our exit strategy. It's a distinct possibility. I've raised this with a number of foreign service and intelligence people, and most of them -- remembering the days of the coups d'etat in the Middle East -- say, "Hear, hear!"

And you know what? I think Rumseld would jump on this idea in five minutes.

Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the bane of neoconservatives, makes some interesting points in a recent speech about how the Democrats haven't exactly distinguished themselves in opposition to President Bush's empire building:

Neither party is in the least introspective. Both are happy to attribute all our problems to the irrationality of foreigners and to reject consideration of whether our attitudes, concepts, and policies might not have contributed to them. Both are xenophobic, Islamophobic, Arabophobic, and anti-immigrant. The two parties vie to see which can be more sycophantic toward whoever's in charge in Israel and to be most supportive of whatever Israel and its American lobby wish us to do. Neither has a responsible or credible solution to the mess we have created in Iraq, a plan for war termination in Afghanistan, an answer for how to deal with Korean issues, a vision for relations with China or other rising powers, or a promising approach to Iran or the challenge of post-Fidel Cuba, among other issues. ...

Both Republicans and Democrats seem to consider that statecraft boils down to two options: appeasement; or sanctions followed by military assault. Both behave as though national security and grand strategy require no more than a military component and as though feeding the military-industrial complex is the only way to secure our nation. Both praise our armed forces, ignore their cavils about excessive reliance on the use of force, count on them to attempt forlorn tasks, lament their sacrifices, and blithely propose still more feckless tasks and ill-considered deployments for them. Together, our two parties are well along in destroying the finest military the world has ever seen.

I couldn't agree more. The Democrats are backing in to the majority in Congress in November, beneficiaries of Bush's singular mendacity, incompetence, and overall thuggishness. Never has the lesser of two evils seemed, well, lesser.

There have been stories about this before, but Lara Logan of CBS has a good one, and shockingly graphic: how Shiite death squads are marauding through hospitals controlled by the Health Ministry in Iraq. That ministry happens to be under the control of Muqtada al-Sadr, the fanatical gang leader and fundamentalist. Here's an excerpt of her story:

An assembly line of rotting corpses lined up for burial at Sandy Desert Cemetery is what civil war in Iraq looks like close up.

The bodies are only a fraction of the unidentified bodies sent from Baghdad every few days for mass burial in the southern Shiite city of Kerbala, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports.

They come from the main morgue that's overflowing, relatives too terrified to claim their dead because most are from Iraq's Sunni minority, murdered by Shiite death squads.

And the morgue itself is believed to be controlled by the same Shiite militia blamed for many of the killings: the Mahdi Army, founded and led by anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The takeover began after the last election in December when Sadr's political faction was given control of the Ministry of Health. The U.S. military has documented how Sadr's Mahdi Army has turned morgues and hospitals into places where death squads operate freely.

The chilling details are spelled out in an intelligence report seen by CBS News. Among some of the details of the report are:

Hospitals have become command and control centers for the Mahdi Army militia.

Sunni patients are being murdered; some are dragged from their beds.

The militia is keeping hostages inside some hospitals, where they are tortured and executed.

They're using ambulances to transport hostages and illegal weapons, and even to help their fighters escape from U.S. forces.

The horror show goes on.

Check out my latest over at TomPaine.com, looking at the life expectancy of the Maliki government in Iraq. And see the entry below, from yesterday, on the same topic.

Don't expect any changes in Iraq policy until after the elections. But after that, anything goes. I'm not yet convinced that the notoriously stubborn Bush will un-stay the course, but he will be under great pressure from all sides to do so.

First, Senator Warner didn't exactly pull the plug, but he started yanking on it:

In two or three months if this thing hasn't come to fruition and if this level of violence is not under control and this government able to function, I think it's a responsibility of our government internally to determine is there a change of course we should take. I wouldn't take off the table any option at this time.

Then, Senator Hagel basically said that the war was a dumb idea. Speaking in Hanoi:

"War should always be a last resort" he remarked. "Leaders of nations should never commit a country to war unless they have carefully thought through the consequences of that action."

Hagel noted that prior to the invasion of Iraq he had asked "some very significant question about going to war."

Then Senator Joe Biden (in Iraq, he's known as Joe Carve-Up-Iraq) said that Republicans in Congress are getting antsy:

Two leading Republican senators have come to me, [saying] 'Joe, I am getting beat up by my team.

Biden added, according to ABC, that after the elections "Republicans will be freer to break with the White House and call for change in Iraq."

BBC suggests, as I've been writing for several months now, that Jim Baker's high-powered ISG might be the way to convince the prez to change things:

President Bush is also waiting for a report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group which will report after the mid-terms.

This group, led by an old Bush family friend and former Secretary of State James Baker and by Democrat Lee Hamilton, could be the peg on which any shift of policy might be hung.

The latest study in the Lancet about Iraqi deaths is staggering: they calculate that 655,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003, about 500 per day since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Critics will quibble about the methodology used in the study. The authors themselves say that the range of deaths runs from 426,369 to 793,663. I'm willing to take the low-end. So more than 426,000 Iraqis have been killed by George W. Bush's war.

I can't resist pointing out that even Saddam Hussein's worst detractors estimate that 300,000 Iraqis died during his reign. I happen to believe that that number is wildly inflated, and certainly it isn't based on any sort of research. It's just a number promoted (before the invasion in 2003) to demonize Saddam. But even if it's true, George Bush has surpassed in three bloody years what took Saddam three decades in power to accumulate.

P.S. Here's a link to the .pdf version of the original Lancet story. It's technical, but read it.

Fifty-eight per cent of Americans believe that President Bush deliberately lied about Iraq's WMD to generate support for the war. That's the conclusion of a survey by Princeton Survey Research Associates for Newsweek.

The specific language was: "Do you think the Bush Administration purposely misled the public about evidence that Iraq had banned weapons in order to build support for war?" Results: 58 per cent yes, 36 per cent no.

Tony Cordesman, one of the most level-headed of the national security analysts on Iraq, has issued a paper called "Options for Iraq: The Almost Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." In it he writes:

Iraq is already in a serious civil war, driven by rising sectarian and ethnic violence between Arab Sunni and Arab Shi’ite, and Arab and Kurd. Iraq’s government is not moving towards political conciliation and compromise at the rate necessary to keep this civil war from getting worse, discrediting the central government, and potentially dividing the country. ...

The US cannot simply wait to see if its existing strategy and actions will work. They will not. The situation is spiraling out of control, and the US must either strongly reinforce its existing strategy or change it. It also needs detailed plans and options for “Plan B,” the possibility that it may have to withdraw its troops and possibly most or all of its civilian presence from Iraq.

This is important. And we'll be hearing more and more about this after the November election.

Four times yesterday Bush talked about the evil “caliphate” that radicals want to create. Unlike in the past, though, he spoke about it as if it already existed, accusing his imagined enemy of trying to “extend the caliphate” and “spread their caliphate.” I wish some reporter had the guts to ask the president to explain what he means, to explain what he thinks a caliphate is, and how a rag-tag band of Al Qaeda types hiding in Pakistan can conquer the land from Spain to Indonesia, which is what Bush keeps warning about.

Here are the relevant excerpts (you can read the whole transcript here):

The strategic goal is to help this young democracy succeed in a world in which extremists are trying to intimidate rational people in order to topple moderate governments and to extend the caliphate.

The stakes couldn't be any higher, as I said earlier, in the world in which we live. There are extreme elements that use religion to achieve objectives. And they want us to leave. And they want to topple government. They want to extend an ideological caliphate that has no concept of liberty inherent in their beliefs.

And they have objectives. They want to -- they want to drive us out of parts of the world to establish a caliphate. It's what they have told us.

It would give these people a chance to plot and plan and attack. It would give them resources from which to continue their efforts to spread their caliphate.

My sources (Iraqi ones, and not pro-Iraqi government) are telling me that a coup d'etat is a live option for Iraq. I'm hearing the same thing from U.S. sources. And then today, in the Post, is David Ignatius' take:

The coup rumors come from several directions. U.S. officials have received reports that a prominent Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlak, visited Arab capitals over the summer and promoted the idea of a national salvation government, suggesting, erroneously, that it would have American support. Meanwhile, top officials of the Iraqi intelligence service have discussed a plan in which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would step aside in favor of a five-man ruling commission that would suspend parliament, declare martial law and call back some officers of the old Iraqi army.

Frustration with Maliki's Shiite-led government is strongest among Iraq's Sunni minority, which dominated the old regime of Saddam Hussein. But as sectarian violence has increased, the disillusionment has spread to some prominent Shiite and Kurdish politicians as well. Some are said to support the juntalike commission, which would represent the country's main factions and include former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi -- still seen by some Iraqis as a potential "strongman" who could pull the country back from the brink.

Whatever's true about "Jimmy Baker," as President Bush calls him, and his Iraq Study Group (ISG), it seems clear that something is afoot. I've been following Baker, Lee Hamilton Inc. for a while now. In the Prospect, I wrote about the options that have dwindled as they've been presented to Baker by the study group's experts, and Eli Lake has more on that in the New York Sun. Lake writes that one of the options ("Stability First") says:

The United States should aim for stability, particularty in Baghdad and political accommodation in Iraq rather than victory. ... Stabilizing Iraq will be impossible without greater cooperation from Iran and Syria.

The other option ("Redeploy and Contain") is basically the option to cut-and-run. (I like that option.) Seems to me, based on my own discussions with people involved in the ISG, that Baker is likely to settle on something in between these two: half-hearted steps to stabilize things, opening talks with Iran and Syria, and phasing out the U.S. military presence.

Laura Rozen, in her blog, is skeptical (cynical?), calling the whole thing a ploy by the White House. Writes Laura:

Seems Baker is a witting campaign prop being coordinated by the White House to communicate the message, the realists will be in charge of foreign policy the next two years. Without the White House having to say it, or it necessarily being true.

I don't see it that way. The realists may not be in charge, yet, but they're getting there. John Warner is the muscle behind Frank Wolf, who created the ISG, and Warner isn't happy. The military, behind Warner, ain't happy, either. Baker is a good lawyer, and when your client (in the case, W.) is guilty, you cut a deal. We might not get W. for murder in Iraq, but he's going down for manslaughter.

Lake quotes a member of the ISG's expert groups thusly: "Baker wants to believe that Sunni dictators in Sunni majority states are representative." Since there only a couple of neocons involved with the ISG, I will leave it to you to guess who threw that particular brickbat at Baker. But I'd guess his initials are RMG.

Tony Snow, the Washington Times pundit turned White House spokesman, is already putting out the message that the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group better toe the president's line, or the president won't be listening:

“We're not trying to outsource the president's job as commander-in-chief,’’ Snow said. “The president continues to receive information and opinions from a wide variety of sources…

“I think there's an assumption that this is an outfit that, when they're finished, will present something, the president will duly follow its course,'' Snow said. "Maybe he will, maybe he won't, but he'll do it on the basis of his judgment.’’

Now, the White House isn’t about to tear up the work of the Jim Baker who ran the campaigns of the president’s father and who helped rescue the president from the 2000 election debacle in Florida. But the White House also has made a point of noting that this report will not simply be: 'Memo to Bush, from Baker.' It’s the work of Republicans, and Democrats.

“The Iraq Study Group was created pursuant to an act of Congress, and certainly we'll want to hear what the Democrats and Republicans on the bipartisan panel have to say,’’ Snow said. “But the president also listens to a lot of other voices, and he's going to do what he thinks best pursues the aim that we have always said we want to achieve, which is a democratic Iraq, an ally in the war on terror, that is able to sustain, govern and defend itself.’’

Nothing could say it better: "The president also listens to a lot of other voices." Not that Snow thinks that Jesus speaks to the commander-in-chief through Tim LaHaye, or anything like that.

Tony Cordesman, the most prolific analyst on Iraq there is, has a piece up at CSIS on Iraq. Excerpt:

This is a civil war ...

The realiity is that the drift towards a major civil war has become steadily more serious ub Kirkuk, and Basra, and in Ninewa, Salah al-Din, and Diyala Provinces. ... In fact, the [Defense Deaprtment] report notes that "sectarian violance is gradualyl spreading north into Diyala Province and Kirkuk as Sunni, Shi'a and Kurdish groups compete for provincial influence ... In the Southern, predominantly Shi'a region of the country, political and tribal rivalries are a growing motive behind the violence, particularly in Basra, with limited anti-Coalition forces, attacks are likely undertake by rogue Shi'a militia."

If you don't read the whole report, just look at the charts.

The following is the transcript of a lengthy interview, slightly edited for grammar, that I conducted by telephone with Salah Mukhtar. Mukhtar, who lives in Yemen, is a former Iraqi official and diplomat who worked in the Information Ministry and who served at the United Nations and as Iraq's ambassador to India. At the time of the invasion in 2003, he was Iraq's ambassador to Vietnam. Though he does not claim to be a spokesman for the resistance in Iraq or for the Baath party, he is close to both. Here is what he had to say:

Q. How strong is the Iraqi resistance?
A. The armed resistance has finished all the preparations to control power in Iraq. The middle class collaborators with the United States have started the leave Iraq already. Most of them are outside Iraq: Ahmed Chalabi, Iyad Allawi and others. A second wave of agents are preparing to leave, and some have already left, to Jordan, to Syria, to Britain, and some other places, because the strategic conflict, practically speaking, has reached the point of putting an end to the occupation. The resistance is controlling Baghdad now. Yesterday, I spoke to many people, and they said that the attack on the American base was part of a new strategy to inflict heavy casualties on American troops in Iraq.

Q. I’ve read that many tribal leaders in Iraq are calling for the release of Saddam Hussein, and others want to cooperate with Maliki.
A. Those who are working with Maliki are living in Jordan, not inside Iraq. They do not dare return to Iraq, especially those who are from Anbar Province, so they have no weight inside Iraq. As for those who are sending messages to release President Saddam, they constitute the overwhelming majority of the tribes in Iraq. It is becoming a national phenomenon. … It started suddenly, hundreds of messages from tribal leaders from the north to the south of Iraq.

Q. Are their pro-Baathist forces in the National Assembly?
A. They are not representing us, but they are sympathetic. They are demanding the elimination of the de-Baathification law, and to open direct dialogue with Baathists. They say that it is nonsense to talk about national reconciliation without including the Baathists in the dialogue. Even Allawi and his group were part of this.

I assure you, the resistance has the upper hand in Iraq. The only thing we are worried about is the direct intervention by Iran. Otherwise, everything is guaranteed. Within four or five hours we can impose security and stability in Iraq after the Americans withdraw. That’s why we want the UN Security Council to declare its opposition to any outside intervention in Iraq, to guarantee that Iran won’t intervene in Iraq. Otherwise, those people allied with the United States will have to leave when the United States leaves. The resistance holds the ground almost everywhere in Iraq.

Q. What is the role of Muqtada al-Sadr? Can you have a dialogue with him?
No. Muqtada is allied with Iran. … Now he is more dangerous than the Badr Brigade. The harm being inflicted on Iraqi society is from the [Sadr’s] Mahdi Army. The Badr group was crippled by the resistance.

Q. Why don’t we see a resistance movement in the Shiite areas of Iraq?
A. There are Shiites occupying high positions inside the resistance, with the Baathists. No other organization has popular support inside Iraq. But the media does not cover what is going on in the south. The nature of the operations in the south is not like the resistance operations in Anbar and Baghdad. It is directed against the so-called Hakim group [the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI] and the Mahdi Army, who are killing the nationalists, cooperating with the occupation. They are killing more people than the occupation forces are. But there is a silent majority in the south, which is against the occupation and against Iran. They are fed up with the crimes of the pro-Iranian groups.

You know, in the south, in many cities, Iran even has official offices, and the Iranian intelligence service is controlling areas of southern Iraq. They are using Iranian money. You can tell a taxi driver, “Got to the office of the Iranian intelligence service,” and they will take you. But the silent majority in the south is fed up with Iranian influence in that area. That’s why we are not concerned with the situation in the south, except for the threat of direct Iranian intervention.

The legitimate army has been rebuilt, the army that went underground in the invasion. Ands they are ready to control Iraq right now. Ninety per cent of all Iraqi resistance is made up of Iraqi army. There are highly qualified officers of the Iraqi army are leading nearly all resistance operations in Iraq.

They built the Iraqi army on a sectarian basis, with Badr Brigade and pesh merga [the Kurdish militias]. But there are some nationalists inside the army, and the resistance gets information from nationalist officers inside the official army.

Q. Will there be a Tet Offensive-type of attack? Will the Green Zone come under attack?
A. There has been talk in Baghdad about liberating the Green Zone, especially over the past few weeks. But this is not likely for the time being, because the strategy of the resistance is based on collecting points, as in boxing. You collect points, one by one, to see who is winning. So you exhaust the enemy, by attacking from time to time, until he collapses. The victory of the resistance in Iraq will not be achieved by one battle.

We expect the first month of next year will be decisive. The Americans are exhausted, and the resistance is preparing simultaneous attacks on American forces everywhere. The increase in U.S. casualties are rising sharply as part of a decision by the resistance to increase these attacks.

Q. Who speaks for the resistance?
A. No one. I do not speak for the Baath party or the resistance. But I am very close to both of them. It was decided before the invasion to not establish direct connections with any other party, to prevent penetration and to make it more difficult to get intelligence. … I speak to them by phone, and mostly by Internet. And by direct meetings, when I travel. … Some Arab governments give me passports to facilitate my movement. They play the role of mediating between the resistance and the United States.

Q. What is the U.S. attitude toward the Baath party?
A. The Americans, generals and others, contacted President Saddam in prison and spoke about the situation in Baghdad and around Iraq,. Rumsfeld met him, and Condoleezza Rice, too. She met him. And before her, Rumsfeld met him. They both tried to convince him to make statements calling on the resistance to lay down their arms and to cooperate in the so-called political process. He rejected that. But they told him, you can choose between the fate of Mussolini and the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte. Later, they alluded to something else, involving the return of the Baath party … And now some Arab governments are pressuring the United States to accept the return of the Baath party to guarantee the stability of Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and some other Gulf states have contacted the United States to convince the United States to reinstate the Baath party as the only solution to minimize Iranian influence in the region.… The Baath party has taken a decision to build a National Front in Iraq, including other parties, including some Kurdish groups.

Q. Would Ayatollah Sistani cooperate?
A. Sistani is nothing. No one listens to him. He is not Iraqi. He will not remain in Iraq after liberation.

Q. It looks like a civil war.
A. Civil war in Iraq will never happen. In my family, there are many Shiites and Sunnis. And the majority of Iraqis are like this. So how can I kill my brother?

Q. Many Iraqis are being polarized by the killings, driven to sectarianism.
A. It is not sectarian fighting. It is political fighting. In the highest leadership of the resistance there are Shiites and Sunnis, Christians and Muslims. They are working together inside the resistance, including Kurds and Turkmen. … The people of Iraq are increasingly blaming Iran and the United States for the killing. … Iran wants to control the area, by using their influence among the Shiites. And who brought the Iranian gangs to Iraq? The United States. You remember, after the attack on Iraq in 1998, after Desert Fox, the Americans concluded that there is no way to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein without cooperating with Iran. So they started their cooperation with Iran, and it began in Europe. And the center of it was Abdel Aziz Hakim. And then Sistani made a fatwa calling on Iraqis to not resist the American invasion, and another fatwa to cooperate with the occupation. And who is supporting the Maliki government? Who supported the Jaafari government? The United States. They are Iranians. Those who are ruling Iraq since the invasion are not Iraqis.

Q. What about the possibility of a military coup in Iraq?
A. If the United States wants to give power in Iraq to the generals, through a military coup, as they are hinting about, that military coup will be [sympathetic to] the Baathists. If its leader is not pro-Baathist, there will be a second coup against that leader. … Because all officers in the Iraqi army, the old army and the new army, are under the control of the Baath party. So there is no solution outside the Baath party.

The increase in the volume of mass killings has increased the willingness of the Iraqi people to accept a military coup. I would say that 80 per cent of the Iraqi people are willing to accept it, to accept anything that would help to crush the Iranian gangs [i.e., the Mahdi Army and the SCIRI’s Badr Brigade]. That coup will be supported by the United States, to purge the Iranian gangs and groups, and destroy them by military might and to establish a military dictatorship for some time. … But those who support a military coup will accept a Baathist coup, a second coup. … The United States has made contact with some Iraqis, old generals, old army Baathist generals, to topple the government of Maliki. They are based in Jordan. Some of them accepted to cooperate with the United States, to crack down on the Mahdi Army and other gangs. And they contacted some tribes in Anbar. They are preparing an attack on Iranian gangs in Iraq, and it will happen, soon.

You know, Iran has said, if it is attacked by the United States, it will attack American troops in Iraq. And this kind of threat is a very serious one. If you combine the attacks on the United States by the Iranian gangs with the attacks of the armed resistance, it will be a big tragedy for the United States. So the American government is trying to minimize the influence of Iranian forces in Iraq before any practical move against Iran.

If [a coup] happens it will be a crazy move by the United States. It will prove again that the United States doesn’t understand the Iraqi situation. Most of the army, the old army, 99 per cent of them, are Baathists. Either the new generals will cooperate with the Baath party, or they will be toppled by the Baath party.

Following the Saudi-sponsored meeting of Iraqi clerics, the Saudis and the Organization of the Islamic Conference plan to sponsor a meeting of Iraqi politicians. No word on whether the Iraqi resistance will be invited, and if so, whether the Shiites will attend.

From UPI and the Washington Times:

Iraqi army officers are reportedly planning to stage a military coup with U.S. help to oust the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Cairo-based Iraqi and Arab sources said Monday several officers visited Washington recently for talks with U.S. officials on plans for replacing Maliki's administration by a "national salvation" government with the mission to re-establish security and stability in Iraq.

One Iraqi source told United Press International that the Iraqi army officers' visit to the United States was aimed at coordinating the military coup in case the efforts of Maliki's government to restore order reached a dead end.

He said among the prominent officers were the deputy chief of staff, a Muslim Shiite, the intelligence chief, a Sunni, and the commander of the air force, a Kurd. It is believed the three would constitute the nucleus of the next government after the army takes over power.

Off and on, there have been reports for two years of sub rosa talks between U.S. authorities and the Iraqi resistance. They're back, and it couldn't come at a more opportune time. From the London Times:

American forces are negotiating an amnesty with Sunni insurgents in Iraq to try to defuse the nascent civil war and pave the way for disarmament of Shia militias, The Times has learnt.

The tactic marks a dramatic reversal of policy by the US military, which blocked attempts to pardon insurgents with American blood on their hands after handing over sovereignty to a secular Iraqi Government in June 2004.

Of course, amnesty is not enough. The principal demand of the insurgency is for a timetable for an American withdrawal. But it's a starting point for a discussion.

An article in Mother Jones co-authored by me and Jason Vest, called "The Lie Factory," is being cited by the Republicans in a race involving Chris Carney, the Democrat, who reportedly served in the forerunner to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. Carney, running against Rep. Don Sherwood, is getting fundraising help from Richard Perle.

The odd thing is, the article by Vest and me never mentioned Carney.

Here's the lead, from Eli Lake of the New York Sun, a newspaper partly owned by Perle:

Voters in Pennsylvania's rural, conservative 10th Congressional District received an unlikely mailing earlier this month accusing a former Navy lieutenant of helping start the Iraq war.

Quoting a 2004 article, "Lie Factory," that appeared in Mother Jones magazine and relied on interviews with a former Pentagon analyst turned White House foe, Karen Kwiatkowski, the mailing highlights Christopher Carney's role in a small intelligence analysis shop inside the Pentagon before the Iraq war. The top of the mailing warns voters, "Chris Carney failed our nation once." "Don't give Chris Carney a chance to FAIL us again," the next page says.

The mailing may seem par for the course in an election season in which Republican incumbents are vulnerable to attacks on their support for an unpopular war. But its return address is the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania. The mailing's target is Mr. Carney, who some see as one of the national Democratic Party's brightest hopes to wrest control of the House of Representatives in 2006.

The political dissonance was amplified on October 19 when President Bush stumped for Mr. Carney's rival and the Republican incumbent, Donald Sherwood.Two days earlier, Mr. Carney was in New York for a fund-raiser hosted by one of the president's original foreign policy advisers in 2000, Richard Perle.

Every American should see this video, from the Guardian (thanks to Antiwar.com and Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher). There's no other better eight minutes on what's gone wrong in Iraq. Watch it here.

I’ve been writing for a while now about post-Maliki options for Iraq, including the notion of a coup d’etat against him with American connivance. There are other options, too. The important thing is, U.S. policy for Iraq is utterly up for grabs post-November 7, and so is what passes for politics in Iraq. Forget Iraq’s elections, constitution, government, and so on – for both Iraqis and American policy makers, it’s back to the drawing board.

In a long analysis of the mess in Iraq and its effects on U.S. policy, the Post quotes that Delphic oracle of the neocon right, Richard Perle, thusly:

"I don't know what the new course would be. The options are extremely limited now. The new course that's necessary is new Iraqi leadership.”

So where would Perle find “new Iraqi leadership”? I wonder whether the neocons aren’t willing to put all their marbles on the Shiite religious right, supporting a coup d’etat of their own that would consolidate the Iraqi army, police and Interior Ministry under a single command, led by a strongman Shiite leader with ties to Dawa and SCIRI, and then throw down the civil war gauntlet to the Sunnis. The idea, then, would be to present the United States with a fait accompli, and a challenge, demanding that Washington support the Shiite side in an all-out civil war against the Sunnis.

Maliki, increasingly defiant of President Bush, seems headed down that path. Maliki, I suppose, hasn't yet read his own political obituary. His comments remind of some TV reality show, "When Puppets Attack."

Specifically, Maliki is making noises about taking control of the Iraqi army. Perhaps that’s defensive, since it’s the army that could overthrow him. But Maliki must also be thinking that if he can get the United States to cede control of the army to the supposedly sovereign “government of Iraq,” then he can unleash the combined might of the Iraqi state against the Sunnis. Shiite leaders are already reemphasizing that the real enemy in Iraq is the “Saddamists and the takfiris,” i.e., the “terrorists.” Never mind that the Shiite death squads are causing the vast majority of the deaths.

I guess Muqtada Sadr is the wild card in all this. It’s horrible to contemplate competing U.S. factions playing out their rivalries in Iraq, since it’s Iraq that will pay the price in continuing carnage.