Some scattered items in the news today shed yet more light on the oft-overlooked U.S.-Iranian alliance in Iraq. Yes, that would be the same U.S-Iran alliance that many Sunnis in Iraq, including Baathists and resistance leaders, keep talking about.

In an interview with Newsweek, Mohsen Rezai, the grand old man of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, says that Maliki's regime in Iraq "is of strategic importance to us. ... We want this government to stay in power. Rival Sunni countries oppose Maliki. We haven't."

The Post, meanwhile, writes about Amar Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, the son of. He's taking over SCIRI, now SICI. (In the article, Robin Wright talks about the conference put together by Hakim, Iraq for All Iraqis, at which I spoke. No, she doesn't mention me.) But in addressing SICI's remaining power in Iraq, the Post notes that SICI's power in the south of Iraq is ever less and less. It quotes an Arab diplomat in Iraq thusly:

The only person who has grass-roots support is Sadr. Hakim has Bush receiving him at the White House and the ayatollahs seeing him in Iran. But Hakim's influence in southern Iraq began to ebb at the end of 2006.

So there you have it. Hakim has the support of the White House and the ayatollahs. And the Iranians are calling the survival of the Dawa-SICI regime in Baghdad "of strategic importance."

That's the context in which to view the newly reaffirmed alliance between Dawa and SICI. The New York Times actually had the gall to suggest that this alliance, proclaimed this week, could salvage Iraq, citing unnamed diplomats in Baghdad thus: "If Kurds were included and a true bloc of moderates could be formed, it could break some of the parliamentary paralysis."

How stupid. The fact is that no bloc of American-supporting moderates can rule Iraq, since they'd be opposed by the only forces with any real popular support: Sadr's Shia and the pro-resistance Sunnis.

PS What's with David Ignatius? One of the best Middle East analysts around, today Ignatius goes ga-ga over Amar al-Hakim. Here's the money quote:

In April 2005 I spent a morning with Amar when he made his first trip to the United States. I will never forget his description of visiting the Lincoln Memorial and looking up at the face of the man who kept America together during the carnage of its own civil war. He wants to save his country, too.

Ignatius is too hardened a reporter to wax misty-eyed when a fundamentalist Shia cleric, whose party runs death squads and torture prisons, claims to admire Abe. Is he really buying this? He "wants to save his country, too"? The Hakims are officially on record as wanting to soft-partition Iraq into oblivion, not save it.

Trapped in Iraq, Defense Secretary Gates wants Democrats to join in a Truman-style Cold War consensus to stay in Iraq long term, but a reduced troop level. That's according to today's Wall Street Journal:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and some allies in the Bush administration are seeking to build bipartisan political support for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq by moving toward withdrawing significant numbers of troops from Iraq by the end of President Bush's term.

The longer the surge lasts, the harder it will be to achieve the longed-for political consensus. Without such agreement, Bush administration officials fear, the U.S. could be forced into a hasty withdrawal that could have dire consequences both for the region and for U.S. stature in the world.

What Mr. Gates and some other high-ranking administration officials have in mind is a modern-day version of President Harry Truman's "Cold War consensus," a bipartisan agreement on the need to contain the Soviet Union. They hope lawmakers from both parties will ultimately agree to make a scaled-back U.S. mission in Iraq a central component of U.S. foreign policy even after Mr. Bush leaves office.

Well, Joe Biden might buy that. Will the rest of the Democrats abandon the idea of withdrawing from Iraq?

Read Human Rights' Watch's report on how the Kurds routinely torture people here.

"Kurdistan security forces routinely subject detainees to torture and other mistreatment," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. "Although Kurdish authorities have taken serious steps to improve conditions at detention facilities, they must do more to end the practice of torture. The government must punish prison officials and interrogators found responsible for abuse."

Arming the Sunni tribal and militia forces could accelerate the division of Iraq into mini-states, if the United States ends up arming all three sides in the Iraqi civil war. That seems to be what we're doing. In a new report, Tony Cordesman of CSIS comments on the downside of building up the Sunni forces:

Nevertheless, the net result, however, is to create a separate Sunni or Shi’ite force whose ties to the central government are uncertain and opportunistic. It is also to create a force built on uncertain tribal and local coalitions. This makes it far from clear what kind of political power such forces will support. For example, in Anbar, it might create the core of a more effective national Sunni political party or role in the central government. It also, however, might emerge as a regional tribal political force that challenged the government or became a new source of armed opposition to it.

Anbar will not be a model for the rest of Iraq, but it exemplifies a growing reliance on local forces may well be the coming paradigm. The continuing failure of the central government’s effort to develop an effective police force, and one that can “hold” the “wins” of Coalition forces and the Iraqi Army is leading to more and more reliance on sectarian and ethnic local security forces in other areas, or to reliance on local police under the de facto control of local political leaders. Almost all of these local political groups and forces are divided along sectarian and ethnic lines.

Recently Max Boot, one of the last neocon holdouts, wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times warning against ending the surge. He noted that the Sunnis are cooperating with the United States, but warned that such cooperation would end if the United States starting pulling out. "That cooperation is unlikely to last if the Sunnis perceive that most Americans are headed for the exits."

Today's New York Times says exactly the opposite. The Times notes:

Many Sunnis, for their part, are less inclined to see the soldiers as occupiers now that it is clear that American troop reductions are all but inevitable, and they are more concerned with strengthening their ability to fend off threats from Sunni jihadists and Shiite militias.

In other words, the Sunnis are tolerating our presence in Anbar precisely because they know we are leaving.

A stunning op-ed by Kiki Munshi, a former provincial reconstruction team (PRT) leader in Diyala province, lays out in detail how the United States wrecked any chance for stability there. Writing in the Post, Munshi describes how he and his team worked with the mayor of Baquba last year, negotiated with former Baathists and assorted other rebels, and valiantly tried to create a working political order in the Shia-Sunni mixed region. But then the Iraqi government appointed a sectarian, death squad-linked general and it all went to hell:

Through the offices of Baqubah Mayor Khalid al-Sanjary, I spoke several times with high-ranking former Baathist military officers who wanted desperately to help their country and to defend it against Iranian incursion. Here our two sides had a common interest: The United States had been tracking the infiltration of war materiel into Diyala from Iran, and much of it was used against us; these Baathists (most of the officers were Sunni) had led Iraqi units during the war against Iran and had no desire to see Iranians control their country. Then came an unfortunate development in the Iraqi forces. The Shiite commanding general was replaced by Maj. Gen. Shaker Hulayel, another Shiite who was said to have been appointed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office.

Hulayel was sectarian to the core. He talked the talk of peace and reconciliation, but his walk was down corridors lined with Sunni detainees, illegally held and tortured. His walk was in front of death squads, sent to take out important Sunnis. His walk was laced with hatred and contempt for the precepts of democracy and order.

His presence was not helpful to the reconciliation process.

Then the U.S. military decided the murderous Hulayel was an ally:

There was also an unfortunate development in the U.S. military. In the fall, the battalion from the 4th Infantry Division was replaced by a cavalry battalion. Our new colonel was eager to finish the job his predecessor had not. He chose to fight with weapons, not words, as a first option. He dropped the "speak softly" and resorted to the big stick. Out of necessity, as our directions were to work with and train Iraqi forces with a goal of handing responsibility to them, the sectarian Hulayel became an "ally."

The predictable result: the mayor was kidnapped, officials were attacked, the Sunni population driven into violent resistance (and, many of them, into the arms of Al Qaeda types). Now we've switched sides again, helping to arm the Sunnis. As Munshi notes: "The Iraqis have not forgotten. They have lived this chapter before."

According to Al Moharer, which often represents the views of the Baathist underground in Iraq, a new political front has been established in Iraq, called the Patriotic, National and Islamic Front for the Liberation of Iraq (PNIFLI). It's set up as a coalition open to "any force or faction opposed or resisting the Occupation" and intended to "unify all the forces, the factions, the committees and the personalities which oppose the Occupation."

Not only is July 15 the date for the U.S. government's interim report to Congress on the "surge," but it also likely to be the date for a no-confidence vote in Maliki's government, according to CBS:

CBS News has learned that on July 15, they plan to ask for a no-confidence vote in the Iraqi parliament as the first step to bringing down the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. ...

Iraq's prime minister is facing his most serious challenge yet. The no-confidence vote will be requested by the largest block of Sunni politicians, who are part of a broad political alliance called the Iraq Project. What they want is a new government run by ministers who are appointed for their expertise, not their party loyalty.

Strangely, the CBS report says that the idea was "discussed in detail on Vice President Dick Cheney's most recent visit to Baghdad, when he met with the Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi." That raises more questions than it answers. Was Cheney opposed, or in favor of, the effort to bring down Maliki? I find it hard to believe that Cheney would support the idea, but it needs some more reporting.

On Wolf Blitzer's show yesterday, Iraq's national security adviser had this to say:

MOWAFFAK AL-RUBAIE, IRAQI NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I can tell you one thing, that after Maliki, there is going to be the hurricane in Iraq. This is extremely important point to make across to the western audience and to the Arab audience, as well.

And in the Post, the Iraqi foreign minister put it this way:

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said in a morning press conference that Iraqi officials "understand the huge pressure" building in the United States for a withdrawal of troops.

But "the dangers could be a civil war, dividing the country, regional wars and the collapse of the state," Zebari said. "We have held discussion with members of Congress and explained to them the dangers of a quick pullout and leaving a security vacuum."

At least he didn't say, a la Creedence:

I see the bad moon arising. I see trouble on the way. I see earthquakes and lightnin. I see bad times today.

From USA Today:

A new USA Today/Gallup poll showed on Tuesday that more than seven in 10 Americans favor withdrawing nearly all U.S troops from Iraq by April. Sixty-two percent said sending U.S. troops to Iraq was a mistake, the first time that number has topped 60 percent in that survey.

You might wonder why the United States is bothering to create a new regional military command, this time for Africa, called Africom. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy tells us why, in a PolicyWatch issued July 10:

Although no African state poses a direct threat to the United States, Washington is concerned about the growth of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups throughout the continent. Africa has the fastest population growth rate in the world, and several of its countries, such as Nigeria, Angola, Libya, and Sudan, are important sources of crude oil.

Oh, right. The oil.

Most of the press conference by the president today was his standard boiler-plate: stay the course, win the war, defeat Al Qaeda. And he seemed to almost whimsically say that he would listen to the senators politely, but that's it: "I value the advice of those senators. I appreciate their concerns about the situation in Iraq, and I am going to continue listening to them."

But then there was an extended riff on the Baker-Hamilton/ISG approach. Does it mean that he's hinting that he might, after all, opt for an ISG-style shift in policy? Your guess is as good as mine:

Well, there's a lot of discussion about a scenario in which our troop posture would be to guard the territorial integrity of the country of Iraq, to embed and train, to help the Iraqi security forces deal with violent elements in their society, as well as keep enough Special Forces there to chase down al Qaeda. As a matter of fact, that is something that I've spoken in public about, said that's a position I'd like to see us in.

However, I felt like we needed to send more troops to be able to get the situation to quiet down enough to be able to end in that position.

And in terms of my own decision making, as I mentioned earlier, I definitely need to be in consultation, and will be, with General David Petraeus, who asked for the additional troops in the first place -- troops which have been in place, fully in place for about three weeks.

And so I would ask members of Congress to give the general a chance to come back and to give us a full assessment of whether this is succeeding or not. And it's at that point in time that I will consult with members of Congress and make a decision about the way forward -- all aiming to succeed in making sure that al Qaeda and other extremists do not benefit from a decision I might have to make.

Readers of this space know I often refer the Catch-22 in Iraqi politics: that any leader that the United States supports in Iraq won't have any popular support at all, and vice versa. Here is how Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and frequent critic of U.S. Middle East policy puts it, in an essay:

The more the current Iraqi regime is seen to depend on our military power, the less legitimacy and authority it enjoys.

From his Thursday news conference:

You know, I guess I'm like any other political figure -- everybody wants to be loved, just sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don't enable you to be loved. And so when it's all said and done, Ed, if you ever come down and visit the old, tired, me down there in Crawford, I will be able to say I looked in the mirror and made decisions based upon principle, not based upon politics. And that's important to me.

Insiders say that pragmatists and realists inside the administration aren't bothering to challenge Vice President Cheney over Iraq, because they know President Bush himself is so utterly engaged on the issue and so committed to "victory." On that "principle," the president seems willing to sacrifice not only the Republican party's electoral hopes in 2008, but the country's most fundamental interests.

An (understated) view of the state of Iraqi affairs from Tom Fingar, deputy director for analysis, at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

Communal violence and scant common ground between Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds continues to polarize politics.

Prime Minister Maliki’s national reconciliation agenda is still only at its initial stages. As the Intelligence Community (IC) noted in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) published in January, even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation.

The religious Shia foundation of Maliki’s government—the Unified Iraqi Alliance—does not present a unified front. It is split over the creation of federal regions, and the two largest factions—loyal to the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and Muqtada al-Sadr respectively—are bitter rivals. One Shia party, the Fadila Party, has left the coalition.

Provision of essential public services remains inadequate; oil output is below pre-war levels; hours of electrical poweravailable have declined and remain far below demand; and inflationary pressures have grown since last year.

With political reconciliation showing few appreciable gains, we have noted that Iraqis increasingly resort to violence. The struggle among and within Iraqi communities over national identity and the distribution of power has eclipsed attacks by Iraqis against the Coalition Forces as the greatest impediment to Iraq’s future as a peaceful, democratic, and unified state.

Read their memo here. The Democratic thinktank is critical of the Salazar-Alexander effort in the Senate to revive the Baker-Hamilton plan, saying that it has been "overtaken by events."

The latest from Prime Minister Maliki: "We say in full confidence that we are able, God willing, to take the responsibility completely in running the security file if the international forces withdraw at any time they want."

That takes the cake for bravado, but of course Maliki and his allies, the Shia religious bloc led by Dawa and SCIRI (SIIC), would simply turn to Iran for help. And they'd get it. Meanwhile, there's more from one of Maliki's top aides, Hassan al-Suneid, who lashed out against the U.S. strategy of working with Sunni tribal militia:

Al-Suneid, a Shiite lawmaker close to al-Maliki, bristled at the pressure. He called Thursday's report "objective," but added, "this bothers us a lot that the situation looks as if it is an experiment in an American laboratory (judging) whether we succeed or fail."

He also told The Associated Press that al-Maliki has problems with the top U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus, who works along a "purely American vision."

He criticized U.S. overtures to Sunni groups in Anbar and Diyala, encouraging former insurgents to join the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq. "These are gangs of killers," he said.

I guess Suneid prefers hi s own gangs of killers, unsurprisngly, to theirs. But it is a little surprising that government in Iraq is getting so prickly about its chief patron, since the kinds of outbursts that Maliki is making can only accelerate pressure for U.S. withdrawal.

Meanwhile, as Wayne White suggests, there are drawbacks but possible opportunities in the emerging U.S.-Sunni alliance:

As welcome as is this turn of events may be, the cooperation of even many battle-hardened insurgents with US forces against al-Qaeda and other terrorists is most likely a rather fragile—and temporary—marriage of convenience.

Iraqi Shi’a are very conscious of something the US must not overlook: if and when al-Qaeda in Iraq and its ilk have been crushed, those same Sunni Arabs who helped accomplish this might well turn against their American occupiers and the Iraqi central government, the next two parties on their long-standing hit list.

And White adds:

The real opportunity for improving US relations with Iraq’s Sunni Arabs relates to withdrawal. A timely US withdrawal, coupled with assurances that the US does not intend to retain bases in Iraq, would provide a chance for a far more peaceful disengagement from what were previously the most violent regions of the country.

There is a really important Post article today interviewing a resistance leader, supposedly the head of the Omar Brigade that was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who sat down with a Post reporter, Joshua Parltow. He's a former member of the Saddam Fedayeen, but not a member of Al Qaeda. The whole story is filled with interesting nuance. He says his forces don't kill random Shia, like Al Qaeda does, but they do kill lots of Shia militia types. Some quotes:

Since the beginning of the occupation until now, I have participated in killing many of the militia members, I say it frankly. .. It's jhard to count [how many]. ...

I personally don't have a hatred of the American people, and I respect American civilization. They have participated in the progress of all the nations of the world. They invented computers. Such people should be respected. But [Shia] who are crying over someone who died 1,400 years ago, these should be eliminated, to clear the society of them, because they are simply trash. ...

The real enemy for the resistance is Iran and those working for Iran. Because Iran has a feud which goes back thousands of years with the people of Iraq and the government of Iraq. ... The problem is that the Americans have a relationship with the slaves [of Iran]: Dawa, Badr Organization, the Mahdi Army are slaves to Iran.

Al Qaeda is more strict than the others in their way of thinking, in terms of applying religious rituals and behavior, and also the way of working. Al-Qaeda, for example, kills every Shiite, while the other factions kill only the Iranian spies or those who are members of militias. ...

Asked what the United States ought to do, he said:

Lift the barriers. Move the checkpoints. Build a hospital. And release the detainees from the area. And you will witness very quickly a tangible difference. The hatred and the strikes against the Americans will be wiped out or greatly reduced. The solution is political, not military. And then the American soldiers will be able to walk down the streets without their protective vests.

Tucked away in a Times story today, one about how U.S. military families themselves are losing faith in the war in Iraq, is this poignant, yet shocking item, from Penny Preszler, a mother of a soldier:

“There was no pride left in his voice, just this robotic sense of despair,” she said, describing a telephone conversation with her son, Skyler, 24, an infantryman on his second tour of duty in Iraq. “Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice,” she recounted his saying.

The same week, she said, her son told her he thought he had seen the worst when he had to pick up the body parts of his dead buddy, but then he saw an Iraqi boy picking up what was left of his dead father.

That about says it all. In an interview on the Times site, Preszler says that the "seven- or eight-year-old boy was crying his eyes out" as he picked up the pieces of his father.

One more thing needs to be said: it seems to me that military investigators need to question Skyler Preszler about possible war crimes. They killed "women on the street"? "KIds on bikes"? And they "had no choice"?

UPDATE July 16: Penny Preszler contacted me to say that the quotes in the Times about her son killing women and "kids on bikes" were not true. She says that she told the Times reporter, Ian Urbina, in a long and rambling sentence, that her son had told her only that his unit had "shot at men, women, kids on bikes, to make them go away." She emphasized that he "did not say anything about killing anyone." She contacted Urbina to talk about a correction. According to Preszler, Urbina said: "Shot at, killed--it's the same thing." But he said he'd review the audio tape that the Times would correct the story if a correction is warranted, according to Preszler.

Outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace of the Marines, suggests that President Bush might order an even bigger "surge" in September, according to AP:

BAGHDAD — The U.S. military's top general said Monday that the Joint Chiefs of Staff is weighing a range of possible new directions in Iraq, including, if President Bush deems it necessary, an even bigger troop buildup.

From an interview with a top Iranian official, Mohammad Jafari, who was almost caught when U.S. forces raided an Iranian office in the Kurdish region of Iraq, in Newsweek:

"Iran can never allow the enemies of Iran to return and take power again. 300,000 of our people were martyred by Saddam. ... If we wanted to basically go against the Americans, we know how to do it."

This in an article about how Iran wants to cooperate with the United States.

So the latest National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism and Al Qaeda is out, and no surprise--it confirms the "gut feelings" of Michael Chertoff. It even reminds us that Al Qaeda "will continue to try to acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear material in attacks."

The big news seems to be that the NIE says that Al Qaeda "will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland." (P.S.: the "Homeland" means the USA.)

Leave it Eli Lake of the Richard Perle-linked New York Sun to run a long, leak-infested piece warning that Al Qaeda is now based in, working through, and cooperating with--Iran!

One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate's senior leadership structure. While there is little disagreement that a branch of Al Qaeda's leadership operates in Iran, the intelligence community diverges on the extent to which the hosting of the senior leaders represents a policy of the regime in Tehran or the rogue actions of Iran's Quds Force, the terrorist support units that report directly to Iran's supreme leader.

In the estimate's chapter on Al Qaeda's replenished senior leadership, three American intelligence sources said, there is a discussion of the eastern Iran-based Shura Majlis, a kind of consensus-building organization of top Al Qaeda figures that meets regularly to make policy and plan attacks. The New York Sun first reported in October that one of the Shura Majlis for Al Qaeda meets in the federally administered tribal areas of Pakistan, one of the areas the Pakistani army this week re-engaged after a yearlong cease-fire. Both Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, participate in those meetings.

The other Shura Majlis is believed to meet in eastern Iran in the network established after Al Qaeda was driven from Afghanistan in 2001. Following that battle, a military planner trained in the Egyptian special forces, Saif al-Adel, fled to Iran. Mr. Zawahri then arranged with the then commander of Iran's Quds Force, Ahmad Vahidi, for safe harbor for senior leaders.

The three main Al Qaeda leaders in Iran include Mr. Adel; the organization's minister of propaganda, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, and the man who some analysts believe is the heir apparent to Mr. bin Laden — one of his sons, Saad bin Laden. The locations of the senior leaders include a military base near Tehran called Lavizan; a northern suburb of Tehran, Chalous; an important holy city, Mashod, and a border town near Afghanistan, Zabul, the draft intelligence estimate says.

Fox News reported that President Bush was "folksy, adamant and mildly profane ," as he crashed unannounced into a meeting of Republican chieftains at the White House. "His message: the policy on Iraq isn't changing. He is not backing down and no one on Capitol Hill should be confused into thinking he is letting up." Was he tipsy? The article doesn't say.

Among newspaper editors at least, the pressure is buidling to get out. According to Editor and Publisher, the Philly Inquirer ("Members of Congress need to be the grown-ups in the room"), the Detroit Free Press ("It is time to start getting America out of Iraq, to stop debating whether the glass is half empty or half full, and start to drain it"), the Sacramento Bee, the Boston Globe, and the Wichita Eagle have editorialized that it's time to wind down the war.

It's clear that despite all the pressure, Republicans have decided to give President Bush a reprieve until the fall. That's no surprise. It allows Democrats to score more points (says Harry Reid: "I admire and appreciate Senator Warner and Senator Lugar very much speaking out. I wish they would vote as well as they talk."), and it allows the antiwar movement to build its district-by-district and state-by-state campaigns to target Republicans.

So the atrocities continue. From the Haditha massacre trial:

"I told him, there's women and kids in that room," Lance Cpl. Humberto M. Mendoza said of Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum. Tatum's response was, "Well, shoot them," Mendoza said. ...

Inside, he found a bed with two women and four or five children on it. "They were scared," Mendoza said. He backed out of the room and told Tatum what he found. But Tatum told him to shoot the women and children, Mendoza testified.

"Was he joking?" asked prosecutor Lt. Col. Paul Atterbury. "He was very serious," Mendoza said.

Tatum then entered the room, Mendoza said. Mendoza heard rifle fire and later saw all of the occupants dead, he said.

Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, left for Iran, according to Iraqi newspapers. The trip is in advance of the U.S.-Iran talks (Round Two) that are supposed to take place in Baghdad, within the next week or so.

Perhaps in anticipation of a drawdown in U.S. forces in Iraq, the Iraqi resistance (the "insurgency") is getting organized. In an interview with the Guardian in Damascus, Syria, the political spokesman of Ansar al-Sunna and the head of the political department of the 1920 Revolution Brigade "decided to speak to the western press for the first time as they prepare to launch a public face and a common political programme in anticipation of eventual American and British withdrawal from Iraq."

Seven of the most important Sunni-led armed organisations - excluding al-Qaida and the Ba'athists - have agreed to form a united front and have drawn up a series of demands to form the basis of future negotiations with the occupation forces.

They say that they do not get aid from Syria, that they rejected offers from Iran ("We do not trust Iran. We need help from Arab and other governments"), and "that there has been indirect contact with France about creating the conditions for a public office."

They reject Al Qaeda and sectarianism. "Our people have come to hate al-Qaida, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists. Suicide bombing is not the best way to fight because it kills innocent civilians. We are against indiscriminate killing - fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy." (The enemy, of course, is the U.S. occupation.)

But they say that it is necessary for the Sunni-based groups to ally with the Shia. ... All the Sunni-led resistance groups are acutely aware of the threat posed by sectarian division to the future of Iraq and emphasise their strong links to those Shia with fewer links to Iran (what they call Arab "national" Shia), but reject any suggestion of making common cause with the Shia militia and political parties - including the anti-American Mahdi Army. ...

While all seven of the armed groups joining the new front reject attacks on civilians, they have no qualms about brutal violence against Iraqi police and soldiers, or US and British troops. ... "Peaceful resistance will not end the occupation," states Abu Ahmad.

The plan is to hold a congress of the seven groups to announce the front's formation and then move towards the establishment of some form of public presence outside Iraq, though it is hard to see any state being prepared to risk the wrath of the US by hosting such an outfit. "It would need UN protection."

The aim is for the front to join other independent anti-occupation forces from across the country to negotiate with the Americans for their withdrawal. ... But ... "As long as foreign forces remain in Iraq, the Iraqi government will not be independent. And armed resistance will continue."

From Bush's meeting with nine "conservative journalists" (i.e., head-nodders, cheerleaders, and so forth), as recounted by Rich Lowry of National Review:

He remains resolute: The Iraq war must, and can, be won. ... Bush is adamant that he is going to see the troop surge through September and then rely on the advice of Gen. David Petraeus on how to proceed. ... Bush gives the impression that he is more steadfast on the war than many in his own administration and that, if need be, he’ll be the last hawk standing.

But when he says that he’s not going to abandon the surge, “it’s just very important for you all to understand that’s exactly what I mean.”

He curtly rejects the suggestion that he will be forced by troop constraints to pull back the surge come next spring, no matter what. “I’m sure that in the bowels of the Pentagon, people are looking at troop rotations and troop movements,” he says. “That is not the primary objective of our commander on the ground — next question.”

As it becomes clearer by the day that President Bush plans to defy Congressional naysayers to the end, Gene Robinson in the Post rounds up some of the results from Bush's meeting with right-wing journalists last week. [I've already quoted Lowry on Bush as the "last hawk standing," in an earlier post.]

Kate O'Beirne and Rich Lowry of National Review, David Brooks of the Times, Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report et al. portrayed Bush as sunny and optimistic. Far from being beleaguered, Bush was assertive and good-humored," says Brooks. O'Beirne said "the most striking thing was the president's incongruously sunny demeanor." And Barone said Bush was "not at all weary or anguished" and "very energized."

And the best quote, from Brooks, makes Bush sound eerily like an Islamist caliphate-builder:

"It's more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn't exist."

What to make of Zalmay Khalilzad's op-ed today on the UN's role in Iraq? I'm not sure. It certainly seems out of step with most of the administration's rhetoric. Ban Ki Moon, the UN secretary general, met Bush at the White House this week, and just before the meeting Ban issued a statement warning against a too-quick pullout of U.S. forces in Iraq. Was that to ingratiate himself with Bush before the meeting? Is Khalilzad's op-ed a payoff for that statement?

Or is something else going on? Are certain people in the administration really ready to turn Iraq over the UN? Zal doesn't go that far, but here is what he does say:

The United States recognizes the global importance of stabilizing Iraq and supports this forward-leaning approach to enhancing the United Nations’ role. The United Nations possesses certain comparative advantages for undertaking complex internal and regional mediation efforts; it can also help internationalize the effort to stabilize the country.

In coming weeks, the United Nations will appoint a new envoy for Iraq and renew the Security Council mandate for its mission in Baghdad. ...

First, the United Nations has unmatched convening power that can help Iraq’s principal communities reach a national compact on the distribution of political and economic power. In the role of mediator, it has inherent legitimacy and the flexibility to talk to all parties, including elements outside the political process.

A new United Nations envoy should have a mandate to help Iraqis complete work on a range of issues: the law governing distribution of hydrocarbon revenues, the reform of the de-Baathification law, the review of the Constitution, the plan for demobilization of militias, an agreement for insurgents to give up their armed struggle. The envoy should be empowered to help resolve the status of Kirkuk and disputed internal boundaries and to prepare and monitor provincial elections. Also, the mandate should make it possible for the United Nations to explore potential third-party guarantees that may be needed to induce Iraqi factions to reconcile. ...

Second, the United Nations is also uniquely suited to work out a regional framework to stabilize Iraq. Several of Iraq’s neighbors — not only Syria and Iran but also some friends of the United States — are pursuing destabilizing policies. The United States supports a new mandate that creates a United Nations-led multilateral diplomatic process to contain the regional competition that is adding fuel to the fire of Iraq’s internal conflict.

In other words, the UN can do literally everything that the United States has failed to accomplish in Iraq: political accommodation, regional accord--the works.

Dan Froomkin, of the Post's White House Watch, is one of the first to raise questions about General Kevin Bergner, the new U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. Since taking over in May, Bergner has made a series of assertions that bolster the White House's view that all of the problems in Iraq are caused by Iran and Al Qaeda. In his Tuesday column, Froomkin notes that Bergner came to the rescue of the president, who was being treated to skeptical questioning from the normally docile White House press corps about the alleged ties between Iraq's insurgents and Al Qaeda:

So what a stroke of luck it was for the White House when, just a day later, the chief military spokesman in Iraq revealed a dramatic story that would appear to support the president's new favorite talking point: Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner chose yesterday to announce the arrest -- two weeks ago -- of a man he called a leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who he said had told interrogators about a close operational relationship between his group and Osama bin Laden's inner circle.

Was the timing coincidental? And is Bergner credible? Until recently he was a member of the White House's national security staff, holding the title of senior director for Iraq. Since taking up his new post in May, Bergner has made a series of politically charged allegations against both al Qaeda and Iran, many of which have been basically unverifiable.

It was Bergner, too, who pointed out that the Iraqi insurgents--including the ones who carried out a sophisticated attack in Karbala im January--are getting aid from Iran and from Iran's Lebanese allies, Hezbollah.

Eli Lake, writing in advance of the release of the latest NIE on terrorism, ties it all together, reporting for the Richard Perle-linked New York Sun that Iran and Al Qaeda are in league, according to U.S. intelligence sources:

One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate's senior leadership structure.

That is a consensus judgment from a final working draft of a new National Intelligence Estimate, titled "The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland," on the organization that attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The estimate, which represents the opinion of America's intelligence agencies, is now finished, and unclassified onclusions will be shared today with the public.

In the unclassified version, at least, there was no mention (or even a hint) of this. Lake goes on:

In the estimate's chapter on Al Qaeda's replenished senior leadership, three American intelligence sources said, here is a discussion of the eastern Iran-based Shura Majlis, a kind of consensus-building organization of top Al Qaeda figures that meets regularly to make policy and plan attacks. The New York Sun first reported in October that one of the Shura Majlis for Al Qaeda meets in the federally administered tribal areas of Pakistan, one of the areas the Pakistani army this week re-engaged after a yearlong cease-fire. Both Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, participate in those meetings.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel is preparing for five wars, all at once, according to a report prepared by Israeli Military Intelligence and "obtained" by the Post:

A year after the Second Lebanon War, Israel is still far from being out of danger. According to Military Intelligence's up-to-date assessments, obtained this week by The Jerusalem Post, the country is heading toward a number of major military conflicts in the coming year, possibly even in the next few months.

Hizbullah is rearming and, according to the IDF, is back at the level of strength it possessed before the war.

Syria is in the midst of an unprecedented weapons shopping spree and making final preparations for war.

Iran is racing toward nuclear power and, if not stopped, might obtain a nuke by as early as 2009.

Hamas has established an enemy Islamic state five minutes south of Ashkelon.

And al-Qaida has declared Israel as one of its primary targets for the coming year.

Adds the Post: "The timeline for these wars is still vague."

Democrats anxious to show hos much they support the troops in Iraq ought to concentrate on efforts to bring them home. Instead, many Dems, led by the most hawkish ones, are hammering the White House to speed up delivery of the super-expensive Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles . These things cost about $1 million each, and the Pentagon is rushing to build thousands of them. It's a $20 billion program.

The current plan is to deliver as many as 3,000 MRAPs to Iraq by year's end:

Soldiers are dying on a daily basis because of these bombs. It ought to be our No. 1 priority," said Rep. Gene Taylor, the Mississippi Democrat who heads the seapower subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.

True, that. But those soldiers would be a lot safer at home, don't you think, Rep. Taylor? Tens of billions of dollars for MRAPs in Iraq makes it sound like we are planning to stay for a long time. Or, maybe they'll be useful when we invade the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Well, it's not a majority, and not veto proof, but 70 stalwart antiwar Democrats in the House (and Ron Paul, the liberatarian Republican from Texas) say that no matter what, they won't vote to extend the war in Iraq. (The current funding, of course, runs out on Sept. 30, 2007.) From a letter to Bush:

We are writing to inform you that we will only support appropriating additional funds for U.S. military operations in Iraq during Fiscal Year 2008 and beyond for the protection and safe redeployment of all our troops out of Iraq before you leave office.

The House takes up the Defense appropriations bill on July 25. Last week, only four House GOP members voted with Democrats to pass a timeable for withdrawal bill. Defense Secretary Gates met with the House Republicans this week, apparently convincing them to hang on until the Sept. 15 report on Iraq.

Two items:

First, there is this, from the Post:

A top aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani was stabbed to death in what Sistani's supporters believe was a warning to Iraq's senior Shiite cleric, authorities said Saturday.

Earlier, this, from IraqSlogger, under the headline “Sistani Rep Slams Iraqi Government”:

Representative of the top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Karbala criticized on Friday Iraqi officials for the deteriorating services and security all over the country and warned against what he described as new growing "dictatorships" during the Friday prayer today in the Shiite shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala.

"Seven months have elapsed from 2007, yet the citizen finds no improvement in the services rendered to him," Sheikh Ahmed al-Safi addressed worshippers in the Shiite sacred shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala...

"There are new dictatorships in Iraq, similar to those of the past, they want to demolish all highly qualified people. These dictatorships now have established themselves well in the governmental departments where things are adapted to the way liked by the dictator official," the Sistani's representative.

Fifty-four Americans killed in Iraq so far in July. In the ten months before that, from October 2006 through June 2007, there were 864 U.S. dead. That latter number can be compared to the ten months before that: from December 2005 through September 2006, 602 Americans died. (Source: Iraq Coalition Casualties)

You can read all the results here, but here's some headline-making numbers:

Who do you trust to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq, Bush or the Democrats in Congress?
Bush, 32 per cent
Democrats in Congress, 55 per cent.

On the "surge": As you may know Bush has sent approximately 28 thousand additional U.S. military forces to try to restore civil order in parts of Iraq. Do you think this increase in U.S. forces has made the situation in Iraq better, worse, or hasn't made much difference?
Better, 22 per cent
Worse, 19 per cent
No difference 56 per cent.

Do you support or oppose legislation that would set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq by next spring?
Support, 55 per cent
Oppose, 43 per cent.

And this! Who do you think should have final say in deciding when to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq - Bush or Congress?
Bush, 31 per cent
Congress, 62 per cent.

Vice President Cheney is losing a trusted aide: David Wurmser, Cheney’s chief adviser on Middle East affairs and perhaps the Bush administration’s most radical hawk. According to multiple sources, Wurmser will leave the office of the vice president (OVP) in August for the private sector, where he will start a risk-consulting business.

Wurmser’s departure is just the latest in a long series of neoconservatives who’ve bailed out of the Bush administration since 2005, including I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Robert Joseph, and J.D. Crouch, along with Richard Perle, who earlier resigned under pressure from the Defense Policy Board, and Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president’s daughter, who left the State Department’s Near East affairs bureau last summer to have her second child.

Wurmser’s departure is not totally a surprise. “He’s been looking for a way out for a year,” said a conservative friend of Wurmser’s, who added that former vice presidential staffers don’t necessarily command a premium in the job market. In addition, said this source: “He thinks there’s a purge going on, and that people are out to get him.”

In June, Wurmser’s name appeared in a front-page New York Times story. In that account, based in part on reporting that first surfaced in Steve Clemons’ blog, The Washington Note, Wurmser was alleged to have told thinktanks and conservative policy analysts that Vice President Cheney disagreed with President Bush’s decision to use diplomacy to dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. According to the Times, Wurmser said “that Mr. Cheney believed that [Condi] Rice’s diplomatic strategy was failing, and that by next spring Mr. Bush might have to decide whether to take military action.”

Reflecting Wurmser’s close ties to the Israeli military establishment and Israel’s right-wing Likud bloc led by Bibi Netanyahu, Clemons reported that Wurmser was colluding with Israel to force a showdown: “Cheney is planning to deploy an ‘end run strategy’ around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument,” wrote Clemons. “The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff … to mount a small-scale conventional strike” on Iran’s nuclear facilities, thus forcing a U.S.-Iran confrontation in its wake.

Meyrav Wurmser, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute and David’s wife, ridiculed the stories from Clemons and the Times. “They are all categorically wrong, and there not one thing in those articles that is correct.” But Meyrav Wurmser herself is a strong advocate for confronting Iran, including support for Iranian opposition groups and military action. “You don’t need to attack the nukes,” she says. You can do something against the oil facilities. You can do something against the parliament building. You can give them an ultimatum: stop building nukes or every week we will take another building down.”

In the 1990s, David and Meyrav Wurmser joined Richard Perle and Douglas Feith to author the famous “Clean Break” paper that they presented to Netanyahu, in which they called for strong Israeli action to force regime change in Iraq and Syria and to redraw the map of the Middle East. Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, David Wurmser worked at the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In the Bush administration, David Wurmser and a colleague, Michael Maloof, founded the predecessor organization to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, where they sought to develop intelligence linking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Al Qaeda. That work, carried out under Feith’s supervision, has been widely discredited, and a recent report from the Pentagon’s own inspector general declared that their conclusions were not supported by the underlying intelligence. Wurmser also spent time as an aide to John Bolton at the State Department before joining Cheney’s OVP as his chief Middle East specialist.

By my count, in Tuesday's speech in South Carolina on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Al Qaeda no fewer than 95 times. Like this:

They know they're al Qaida. The Iraqi people know they are al Qaida. People across the Muslim world know they are al Qaida. And there's a good reason they are called al Qaida in Iraq: They are al Qaida ... in ... Iraq.

Listening to Ambassador Ryan Crocker describe his meeting with his Iranian counterpart, their first encounter since May 28, makes you wonder what he thought he was accomplishing:

"I would not describe this as a shouting match throughout, but we were real clear on where our problems with their behavior were, and I just didn't hesitate to let them know. It's up to them to decide what they want to do about it. ... We didn't pull our punches."

Is Crocker trying to show Bush what a tough guy he is? The idea that our problems in Iraq are caused by Iran is utterly nonsense. Iran's closest friends in Iraq are the same ones as President Bush's , namely, the Maliki regime, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), and their allies. And Iran's enemies in Iraq are also the same ones that Bush is trying to combat: Al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgents, the Iraqi resistance, the Baath party, Saddam loyalists, and, of course, Muqtada al-Sadr's independent-minded army.

Sure, Iran could help us in Iraq. They could lean heavily on Maliki and the Hakims to make a deal with the Sunnis.But why should they? Iran knows we're leaving. Iran knows that it can work closely with the Iraqi Shia leadership when we're gone.

Come to think of it, I guess that does explain why Crocker was yelling.

From Reuters:

A large meeting of Iraqi rebel groups that was due to be held in Damascus yesterday was cancelled at the behest of Syria, delegates said.

Hundreds of delegates, including members of the banned Iraqi Baath Party, officers in Saddam Hussain's now defunct security forces and anti-US tribal leaders, had gathered in Damascus to work out a joint programme for groups opposed to the continued presence of US forces in Iraq.

"The Syrians gently made it clear that this is not the time for this," a senior Baath Party member said.

"The Americans and their Iraqi government clients are intensifying their lies that Syria is behind terrorism and attacks on innocent Iraqis, which we all condemn."

He was speaking at a meeting to announce the cancellation of the conference at a hotel in the outskirts of Damascus. The decision did not go down well with most participants, especially those who had travelled from Iraq.

Some delegates linked the meeting's cancellation to the visit last week to Syria by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A communique issued after a meeting between Ahmadinejad and President Bashar Al Assad last week said the two leaders were adamant about the need to end US occupation but back the Iraqi government and "condemn terrorism against the Iraqi people and their institutions".

Thousands of Iraqi Baathists and former security figures have made Syria their base since the 2003 US invasion.

I find the link to Ahmadinejad's visit plausible.

Now we learn that VIce President Cheney attended strategy sessions at the American Enterprise Institute to plan the Iraq "surge." AEI began holding sessions last December to come up with an alternative strategy, at the time when many people expected Bush to seize the Baker-Hamilton strategy. Reports the S.F. Examiner:

When it comes to the troop surge in Iraq, a bunch of arm chair generals in Washington are influencing the Bush Administration as much as the Joint Chiefs or theater commanders.

A group of military experts at the American Enterprise Institute, concerned that the U.S. was on the verge of a calamitous failure in Iraq, almost single handedly convinced the White House to change its strategy.

They banded together at AEI headquarters in downtown Washington early last December and hammered out the surge plan during a weekend session. It called for two major initiatives to defeat the insurgency: reinforcing the troops and restoring security to Iraqi neighborhoods. Then came trips to the White House by AEI military historian Frederick Kagan, retired Army Gen. John Keane and other surge proponents.

More and more officials began attending the sessions. Even Vice President Dick Cheney came. "We took the results of our planning session immediately to people in the administration," said AEI analyst Thomas Donnelly, a surge planner.

"I think without the AEI exercise, it would be highly unlikely we would have followed a completely different course over the last six months in Iraq," Donnelly said.

Of course, a thinktank is a thinktank. When the vice president of the United States shows up, and when his wife works at the thinktank, that's another thing.