Iraq in danger of civil war, warns Annan ahead of crucial UN assembly

Kofi Annan has stated that Iraq is on the verge of civil war:

"If current patterns of alienation and violence persist much longer, there is a grave danger that the Iraqi state will break down, possibly in the midst of full-scale civil war."

However, when Bush addresses the assembly it is unlikely that Iraq will the topic he most wants to discuss as he is planning on outlining to the United Nations the need for a tough sanctions regime to be placed upon Iran unless the Iranians agree to suspend Uranium enrichment.

Ahmadinejad will himself address the conference a few hours after Bush does so and Washington are going to great lengths to ensure that the two leaders do not meet accidentally.

Washington has made it clear that no negotiations with Tehran will be allowed until the Iranians have suspended their nuclear programme. "The conditions are quite clear and quite unmoveable," a western diplomat said.

This is the same stupid stance that Bush has held for some months now: "Stop enriching uranium so we can begin to talk about whether you should be enriching uranium."

It's becoming clear from the utterances of some of the nutters on the right that Bush actually intends to hit Iran with some kind of missile strike, despite the chaos that this will inevitably unleash across the Middle East.

Charles Krauthammer almost gleefully reported:

In his televised Sept. 11 address, President Bush said that we must not "leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons." There's only one such current candidate: Iran.

The next day, he responded thus (as reported by Rich Lowry and Kate O'Beirne of National Review) to a question on Iran: "It's very important for the American people to see the president try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force."

The use of the word "before" is the strongest hint yet that Bush intends to use force in order to stop Iranian enrichment.

According to even an admirer like Krauthammer:

The costs will be terrible.

He goes on to list the possible costs. Oil as expensive as $150 a barrel, a world wide recession, the closing of the straits of Hormuz, the unleashing of Iran's military proxies in Iraq causing the destabilisation of all the work the US coalition have done there.

Nor will an act as rash as this be popular as Krauthammer also concedes:

There will be massive criticism of America from around the world. Much of it is to be discounted. The Muslim street will come out again for a few days, having replenished its supply of flammable American flags, most recently exhausted during the cartoon riots. Their governments will express solidarity with a fellow Muslim state, but this will be entirely hypocritical. The Arabs are terrified about the rise of a nuclear Iran and would privately rejoice in its defanging.

The Europeans will be less hypocritical because their visceral anti-Americanism trumps rational calculation. We will have done them an enormous favor by sparing them the threat of Iranian nukes, but they will vilify us nonetheless.

These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing.

So even Bush's supporters concede that the path he seems intent on bludgeoning down is one that carries tremendous costs and enormous loss of human life. However, we are told that there is no alternative. This, despite the fact that Ahmadinejad has said he is prepared to talk, even to talk about the suspension of uranium enrichment, he is simply not prepared to do so as a precondition of those talks taking place.

So Bush will attend the UN, ignore the fact that the Secretary General is pointing out his last conflict has resulted in possible Iraqi civil war, and lay out the plans for his next war by calling for sanctions on Iran, sanctions that he must know won't be granted as Jacques Chirac has already broken ranks with the US and Britain by calling for the suspension of UN Security Council action against Iran during negotiations over its nuclear programme.

But Bush will ask for them anyway, so that he can then tell the American people that the president tried "to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force."

The astonishing thing about Bush's new plan is that he seems to believe - or perhaps it is simply that he no longer cares - that the American people will back him in another military venture.

They won't. It appears that Bush and Cheney no longer care what they think anyway.

When a leader comes up with a plan as dangerous as this one and intends to plough ahead with it despite having no popular support for it at home, one really has to wonder about the state of the democracy in which such actions could even be contemplated.

But this is where we find ourselves in the final years of Bush's presidency. It's chaos masquerading as resolve. Indeed, when one looks at the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, chaos masquerading as resolve seems the best way to sum up Bush's entire time in office.

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Tags: UN, US, Iran, sanctions, Ahmadinejad, Bush, uranium, enrichment, negotiations,