Iraq cancels peace talks after scores more die

With the head of Britain's army now openly calling for a quick withdrawal from Iraq it is becoming open to question how long Bush and Blair can continue to pretend that there is an honourable way out from the quagmire they have created in former Mesopotamia.

Now authorities in Baghdad have had to cancel a conference of political leaders that was hoping to meet to discuss ways to end the violence because the security situation has simply plunged out of control.

In the weekend's most vicious act of score-settling between the Shia and Sunni Arabs, at least 63 people were killed in the town of Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad.

On Friday, police said the decapitated bodies of 17 Shia labourers had been found in an orchard near the town, which has a mixed Shia-Sunni population but lies in a majority Sunni area. In apparent retaliation, at least 46 Sunni Arab men were reportedly killed on Saturday and Sunday, as heavily armed, black-clad men described by one police source as being from the al-Mahdi militia of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr set up fake checkpoints in the town, stopping vehicles and hauling out anyone suspected of being a Sunni.

Northern Iraq also witnessed a dramatic surge in attacks. At least 10 people were killed yesterday by a coordinated wave of suicide bombs in the contested oil city of Kirkuk. In one blast a bomber blew up his car outside a teachers' institute for women, killing four.

Last week Jan Egeland, the UN's top humanitarian official, said the "blunt, brutal violence" was killing at least 100 Iraqis every day and displacing 9,000 every week. "Revenge killing seems to be totally out of control," he said.

And echoing the words of General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the British army, it now appears that the US are ready to accept that the aim of establishing a democracy in Iraq is perhaps too ambitious a plan:

In the US, a bipartisan commission to formulate policy on Iraq, is reported to have ruled out the prospect of establishing a democracy, and is focusing instead on the more modest options of trying to achieve a modicum of stability or redeploying troops elsewhere in the region.

The commission, headed by a former Republican secretary of state, James Baker, will not officially publish its findings until after the November elections but, according to leaks to the New York Sun, it is considering two option papers Stability First and Redeploy and Contain. Stability First says US troops should focus on stabilising Baghdad while US diplomats negotiate a settlement with insurgents. Redeploy and Contain calls for a phased withdrawal, retaining the ability to strike from a distance.

One has to wonder how Bush and his cronies will attempt to sell this.

After all, once it was established that the original reason for invading Iraq was totally bogus - Saddam's supposed stockpiling of WMD - the Bush camp swiftly started promoting the exportation of democracy as the new Bush doctrine claiming that "democracies don't do war"' which was either an admission (since the US was engaged in an illegal invasion) that the US, under Bush, was no longer a democracy - or simply the stupidest thing ever said by any US President.

Either way, it now appears that those surrounding Bush are finally accepting the folly of his ambition to export democracy as if it was a piece of self assembly IKEA furniture.

This is the final proof of the failure of Bush and Blair's misadventure, although I expect neither man to have the dignity to admit it.

Bush will swiftly find a way to blame someone else, as he always does, and Blair will concentrate on the fact that Saddam is no longer in power. But neither man will ever be able to justify the horrendous loss of human life that their actions produced. I know callous right wingers find it easy to dismiss the figures released of 655,000 dead Iraqis without ever feeling any need to produce any evidence to justify their dismissal, but even they cannot deny that tens of thousands of innocents have perished. We can now ask, for what?

There were no WMD. There is no democracy. There certainly is no stable example to use as a blueprint for the rest of the Middle East as was promised.

What we have is a broken country, ravaged by civil war, and spilt into sectarian factions.

There is no way even a pair of accomplished fabricators like Bush and Blair could sell that turkey as a success. In the early days of this conflict I used to say it was the worst British foreign policy intervention since Suez. I was being far too kind. This leaves Suez at the boys gate.

This is the worst British foreign policy intervention since the 1839 invasion of Afghanistan and the worst American foreign policy intervention since Vietnam. Iraq is now too dangerous a place to even hold talks on the possibility of peace.

Bush and Blair can start spinning this any way they choose, but the reality on the ground tells it's own story.

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tag: Iraq, withdrawal, pull-out, United, States, sectarian violence, peace talks, Blair, Bush, democracy,