Gary Hart on Bush-league diplomacy in the Middle East

Gary Hart writes in Diplomatic Failure in the Secret Society Huffington Post 07/23/06:

Up to now our government (president and acquiescent Congress) has tried to combine unilateral preventive warfare in Iraq with detachment and avoidance in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontations. This has produced a failed occupancy in Iraq, a failing occupancy in Aghanistan (recently described by the British NATO forces commander as near collapse), and war between Israel and most surrounding neighbors.

Why not just retreat to fortress America and let them settle it themselves. Well, we have our own ongoing conflict with the jihadis who originated in the region, but who, except for their Iraqi training ground, have moved the center of their operations to Europe. And then, of course, there is that little matter of OIL.

Even if we had an administration in Washington that took diplomacy seriously, which we don't, our bona fides and integrity will remain compromised by our Persian Gulf oil dependency.

Some of the reports coming out of Iraq are very unhopeful about the future of the situation there -   Gloom descends on Iraqi leaders as civil war looms Reuters 07/21/06:

Iraqi leaders have all but given up on holding the country together and, just two months after forming a national unity government, talk in private of "black days" of civil war ahead.

Signalling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters.

Tens of thousands have already fled homes on either side.

"Iraq as a political project is finished," one senior government official said -- anonymously because the coalition under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki remains committed in public to the U.S.-sponsored constitution that preserves Iraq's unity.