Unless we immediately begin a coordinated effort to refocus NATO’s military and civil strategy in Afghanistan, there will be grave consequences for both the region and the Alliance. That’s the consensus among three reports released yesterday afternoon on Capital Hill receiving wide media coverage today, including this piece fronting WaPo.

NATO forces in Afghanistan are in a “strategic stalemate,” as Taliban insurgents expand their control of sparsely populated areas and as the central government fails to carry out vital reforms and reconstruction, according to an independent assessment released yesterday by NATO’s former commander.

“Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan,” said the report by the Atlantic Council of the United States, chaired by retired Gen. James L. Jones, who until the summer of 2006 served as the supreme allied commander of NATO.

“Afghanistan remains a failing state. It could become a failed state,” warned the report, which called for “urgent action” to overhaul NATO strategy in coming weeks before an anticipated new offensive by Taliban insurgents in the spring.

The Atlantic Council report was one of two strongly worded assessments of the war in Afghanistan — both led by Jones — released at a Capitol Hill news conference yesterday. The second was by the Afghanistan Study Group, co-chaired by Jones and Thomas R. Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and other nations.

Jones said several steps are needed to “regain the momentum that appears to have been lost” in Afghanistan: a comprehensive campaign plan that integrates security and reconstruction work; the appointment of a United Nations High Commissioner to coordinate international efforts; and a new regional approach to stabilizing Afghanistan that would include conferences with neighboring countries such as Pakistan and Iran.

Progress in Afghanistan “is under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country,” said the report by the Afghanistan Study Group, created by the Center for the Study of the Presidency, which was also involved with the Iraq Study Group.

“The United States and the international community have tried to win the struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid,” the report said. It highlighted the lack of a clear strategy needed to “fill the power vacuum outside Kabul and to counter the combined challenges of reconstituted Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a runaway opium economy, and the stark poverty faced by most Afghans.”

As the Council’s managing editor, I attended the unveiling yesterday, which was under the auspices of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South and Central Asian Affairs. John Kerry, the chairman, observed that, “We shouldn’t have to be reminded about the importance of Afghanistan but, as these reports highlight, we do.” Norm Coleman, the ranking member, agreed that Afghanistan was “a critical front on the war on terror” and urged action.

Typically, reportage of events that I’ve witnessed varies considerably with my own take but the press has been quite good. BBC also has excellent coverage.

The full report, “Saving Afghanistan: An Appeal and Plan for Urgent Action,” is available in PDF format on the Atlantic Council website, along with the companion piece from the Afghanistan Study Group.

Cernig says this news “should be sobering reading for the Bush cheerleading faction.” Kerry, who obviously would have preferred a different choice for president in the last election, says that the issue here is “presidential leadership” and that the “war of choice” in Iraq is the reason we’re doing so poorly in Afghanistan. Resources being limited, there’s some truth to that. Certainly, the need for Pakistan as an ally in Iraq has complicated counterterrorism efforts on the Afghanistan border.

The point of the reports, though, is not that we’re putting insufficient military resources into Afghanistan or that we’ve “taken our eye of the ball.” Indeed, precisely the opposite. The problem is that — as in Iraq — while we’re making progress on the military front, killing Taliban insurgents in great numbers, we’re not making enough progress on the all-important civil front. The national police are insufficiently trained, reconstruction programs are lagging, infrastructure is poor, jobs are scarce, and drug trafficking is having all sorts of ripple effects.

Yes, we need political consensus to continue and expand NATO’s efforts on the security front. But, much more importantly, we need a coordinated international effort to address all facets of the problem. Both our report and that of the Afghanistan Study Group recommend a High Commissioner-type individual — the wish was for Paddy Ashdown to reprise his superb effort in the Balkans but that hope was dashed on the eve of yesterday’s announcements — to oversee the effort.

By popular demand, I herewith comment on the story Newsday that broke yesterday that Rudy Giuliani missed two meetings of the Iraq Study Group because of fundraising trips and then quit the panel when told the alternative was to show up.

Giuliani failed to show up for a pair of two-day sessions that occurred during his tenure, the sources said – and both times, they conflicted with paid public appearances shown on his recent financial disclosure. Giuliani quit the group during his busiest stretch in 2006, when he gave 20 speeches in a single month that brought in $1.7 million.

Frankly, faced with a choice between $1.7 million and participating in a group with a bunch of other people who aren’t experts to present advice to the president he isn’t going to take anyway, I’d take the $1.7 million every time. (In full disclosure, I must confess that neither alternative has been offered.)

Then again, I’m not, as Kevin Drum puts it, “running for president based on his reputation as a hero of 9/11.” Drum’s right, too, that this is a significant story and that it’s odd that there has not been more press coverage.

I’ll be interested to see how Giuliani handles this question. I’d be perfectly content if he simply says, “Hey, I wanted the money. I’ve been in public service for decades and I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to cash in to attend a couple of meetings.” My guess is he’ll offer something less candid as an answer.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has announced that Iranian representatives will take part in a regional conference to discuss Iraqi security issues at Sharm el-Sheikh this week. Condi Rice would not rule out talking to the Iranians on yesterday’s This Week and said that, if she talked to her counterpart, she would ask him to “stop the flow of arms to foreign fighters” and to “stop the flow of foreign fighters across the borders.”

What’s interesting is that this winds up being a back door way of talking to Iran and Syria as per the Iraq Study Group recommendations.

Kingdaddy is right, too, that talks with the Iranians have to get beyond the security issues if they are to bear any fruit. “Any discussion that focuses purely on one or both of these issues omits other Iranian interests, such as its energy projects with India, Russia, and other countries. In other words, while security issues top the list, compartmentalizing them removes what little leverage the US government has with Iran.”

Thomas Barnett expresses his frustration that everything he writes gets interpreted through political lenses and, especially, “as some grubby plea for attention from Dem candidates” when in fact he’s a moderate Republican who’s simply disgusted by the Bush Administration’s handling of foreign policy.

People are misinterpreting my praise for the Dems tying Bush’s hands. I expect the Dems to be what they are: the opposition. I do not expect them to come up with better plans. That’s not how our system works or has ever really worked. I expect Bush to come up with a better plan on the basis on the effective resistance from the opposition. I don’t expect Congress to determine U.S. foreign policy.

What’s so frustrating right now is that Bush was told by the Iraq Study Group what the logical way ahead should look like, and despite the showy bits here and there, he’s continued to blow off their recommendations completely. I find that deeply troubling after the beating he took in the midterms, especially since the GOP hierarchy stacked the ISG deck just to make it easier.

Of course, Bush may simply have come to the honest conclusion that the ISG recommendations were a thinly disguised surrender to the “forces of disconnectedness” that Bush and Barnett agree are the real enemy. Indeed, I know of few serious analysts who though the ISG provided a roadmap to victory.

Barnett’s right, though, about the way the system works. At most, Congress can force a president to moderate or rethink his policies. Congress has neither the institutional power nor the staffing resources to do much more than that.

The peril of public intellectualism in the context of a permanent campaign cycle and the hyper-partisanship of the modern era is that everything is viewed in political terms. It’s virtually impossible to have an intelligent, public discussion of complex and controversial issues without it being seen as either carrying water for the administration or traitorous disloyalty to the cause.

My friend Marc Danziger, better known on the Web as “Armed Liberal,” is seeing the same thing from the opposite side of the aisle. He is a self-described “liberal Democrat (pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, pro-progressive taxation, pro-equal rights, pro-environmental regulation, pro-public schools) who supported and supports the war in Iraq.” He’s also frustrated with the current debate and trying to do his part by creating Victory PAC, which is raising money to “help candidates who oppose sudden withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and who bring effective and genuinely new ideas on how to resolve the wider global conflict those wars are a part of.” It’s a nascent effort–launched just this weekend–and will likely be used to give seed money to “pro-victory candidates” in the Democratic primaries.

I’m holding off on support for now for a variety of reasons. I’m generally leery of moving from punditry to activism; have thus far declined to endorse any groups that endorse a wide range of candidates because I’ll invariably disagree with specific choices; and am ethically uncomfortable with intervening in the selection of Democratic candidates beyond simple analysis since, at the end of the day, I will almost certainly vote Republican.

Still, I applaud the motivation behind the effort. It’s imperative that the Iraq War debate be conducted based on the national security interests of the United States rather than in terms of partisan politics.

Plenty of analysts I respect, including Barnett, think it’s time to pull the plug on the war. That’s a perfectly legitimate position to have. Indeed, four years into the effort with little sign of impending victory, it’s not surprising that the consensus desire of the American public is for it all to be over with. I remain convinced that because, of “the tragic consequences that would follow” defeat–and leaving with Iraq in its present condition would unquestionably be that–we should continue to fight on as long as there’s a chance of winning.

Regardless, the debate should be conducted on those grounds. It’s impossible to take the politics out of politics, of course. But we should resist casting those with honorable differences as “traitors” or presuming partisan political motivation for their views.

Buried in a much longer story that lead with action in Anbar Province in which Iraqi security forces killed and captured a number of Al-Qaeda was a story that I found even more interesting:

In Stockholm, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said there would be an announcement in a few days to reintroduce 1,000 mid-ranking officers from the former Iraqi military into the new army as a “sign of reconciliation”.

Clearly, the U. S. made a significant number of errors in the early days of its occupation of Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s government was eliminated but IMO two of the most serious were the disbanding of the Iraqi military and de-Ba’athification. There is a host of reasons that this was a mistake, not the least of which is that since so many people worked for the Iraqi government under Saddam and, implicitly, were, willy-nilly, Ba’athists, that removing them not only paralyzed the government in Iraq but the economy as well.

The Oil Law and revision of the de-Ba’athification Law were two of the milestones for the Iraqi government from the ISG Report so I guess the progress of the Oil Law and this story are good news. I don’t think we should underestimate the complexity of incorporating these member of the old Iraqi Army into the new, however.

WaPo fronts a Thomas Ricks piece about a “brain trust” of PhD-holding officers being assembled by LTG David Petraeus to figure out how to win the Iraq counterinsurgency.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals — including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders — in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war. Army officers tend to refer to the group as “Petraeus guys.” They are smart colonels who have been noticed by Petraeus, and who make up one of the most selective clubs in the world: military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq.

[...]

As the U.S.-designed campaign to bring security to Baghdad unfolds, Petraeus’s chief economic adviser, Col. Michael J. Meese, will coordinate security and reconstruction efforts, trying to ensure that “build” follows the “clear” and “hold” phases of action. Meese also holds a PhD from Princeton, where he studied how the Army historically handled budget cuts. He is the son of former attorney general Edwin Meese III, who was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, whose December critique helped push the Bush administration to shift its approach in Baghdad.

Petraeus, who along with the group’s members declined to be interviewed for this article, has chosen as his chief adviser on counterinsurgency operations an outspoken officer in the Australian Army. Lt. Col. David Kilcullen holds a PhD in anthropology, for which he studied Islamic extremism in Indonesia.

[...]

The two most influential members of the brain trust are likely to be Col. Peter R. Mansoor and Col. H.R. McMaster, whose influence already outstrips their rank. Both men served on a secret panel convened last fall by Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to review Iraq strategy. The panel’s core conclusion, never released to the public but briefed to President Bush on Dec. 13, according to an officer on the Joint Staff, was that the U.S. government should “go long” in Iraq by shifting from a combat stance to a long-term training-and-advisory effort.

Warrior-scholars are the ideal leaders for COIN, which requires detailed cultural and historical awareness. Petraeus himself holds a PhD in international studies from Princeton.

It should be noted that many elite universities–including Princeton–have “understandings” with the military that specially selected officers will emerge with a PhD in hand in no more than three years. That’s far less time than typical for earning a doctorate these days, although it was a typical schedule as recently as the 1960s. Granting that mid-grade officers have extraordinary time management skills compared to the average grad student and are drawing their full salaries and thus not distracted by teaching assistantships and the like, there is a certain gentleman’s course aspect to some of these degrees.

That said, this is an interesting experiment. A team of proven military leaders with demonstrated intellectual curiosity and expertise in their subject matter is a radical change from the mentality that preceded Petraeus’ turn at the helm.

Lee Hamilton and Ed Meese have told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the training of Iraq’s police and judges has been mishandled.

The U.S. erred by first assigning the task of shaping the judicial system in a largely lawless country to the State Department and private contractors who “did not have the expertise or the manpower to get the job done,” Hamilton and Meese said in testimony obtained by The Associated Press. In 2004, the mission was assigned to the Defense Department, which devoted more money to the task. But department officials also were insufficiently trained for the job, Hamilton and Meese said.

As a result, Iraq has little if any on-the-street law enforcement personnel or a functioning judicial system free of corruption, they said. Justice Department officials, they said, should lead the work of transforming the system. Police executives and supervisors should replace the military police personnel now assigned. And the FBI should expand its investigative and forensic training in Iraq, Hamilton and Meese told the panel.

The recommendations about the Iraqi judicial system were included in the Iraq Study Group’s report last year, but got little attention. Hamilton and Meese said Wednesday that unless the U.S. helps create a capable, trained professional police force and functioning criminal justice system, “ordinary Iraqis will not live in peace and will not have confidence in their new government.”

It’s unclear to me why military police, who are at least as well trained as their civilian counterparts, would not be up to the task of teaching police tactics. Further, as a logistical matter, there are almost certainly not enough FBI trainers available to go around and it’s unlikely enough civilian police would have any desire to deploy to Baghdad for this mission to matter.

I would argue, too, that the situation faced by Iraqi security forces far more closely resembles a military policing task than ordinary peacetime law enforcement. Indeed, I can’t imagine LAPD or NYPD would be all that effective in Baghdad under present circumstances.

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have sent a letter to President Bush–and everyone else–arguing against a “surge” of forces in Iraq.

Some excerpts and commentary:

The American people demonstrated in the November elections that they don’t believe your current Iraq policy will lead to success and that we need a change in direction for the sake of our troops and the Iraqi people

While the polls do seem to show that, it’s hardly the case that the elections “demonstrated” this. Indeed, it’s generally hard to say that midterm elections demonstrate much of anything in the aggregate, since they’re a series of one-on-one match-ups. While there was a general “we need change” motif to the campaign, there was hardly a coherent platform. For that matter, not every Democrat who won the election supports the Pelosi-Reid position on the war.

Despite the fact that our troops have been pushed to the breaking point and, in many cases, have already served multiple tours in Iraq, news reports suggest that you believe the solution to the civil war in Iraq is to require additional sacrifices from our troops and are therefore prepared to proceed with a substantial U.S. troop increase.

That our “troops have been pushed to the breaking point” is hardly an established “fact.” As to many of them having served multiple tours, it is, after all, their job to fight their country’s wars.

Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried and that has already failed.

Although I’m willing to be sold, I think a surge at this point is a bad idea. Still, it’s silly to argue that it has
“already [been] tried and that has already failed.” In the early days of the war, critics were complaining that that Bush and company had sent too few troops. When, exactly, did we try a surge?

Like many current and former military leaders, we believe that trying again would be a serious mistake. They, like us, believe there is no purely military solution in Iraq. There is only a political solution. Adding more combat troops will only endanger more Americans and stretch our military to the breaking point for no strategic gain.

Uh, isn’t the military already stretched to the breaking point? You just said so, remember?

And the fact that there is no purely military solution–the administration’s view as well–does not been there isn’t a military component to the solution. It’s far from clear that adding troops will only put troops in danger; it’s conceivable that a well executed use of force would lower the risk.

And it would undermine our efforts to get the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future.

But making someone else “take responsibility” for cleaning up a mess we helped create is problematic, no?

In a recent appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General John Abizaid, our top commander for Iraq and the region, said the following when asked about whether he thought more troops would contribute to our chances for success in Iraq: “I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the Corps commander, General Dempsey. We all talked together. And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no. And the reason is, because we want the Iraqis to do more. It’s easy for the Iraqis to rely upon to us do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future.” [ You should probably either have included this passage OR the paragraphs above where you said exactly the same thing. -ed.)]

Yet these commanders have been in charge on the ground without the surge. How is that working out for them?

Rather than deploy additional forces to Iraq, we believe the way forward is to begin the phased redeployment of our forces in the next four to six months, while shifting the principal mission of our forces there from combat to training, logistics, force protection and counter-terror. A renewed diplomatic strategy, both within the region and beyond, is also required to help the Iraqis agree to a sustainable political settlement . . In short, it is time to begin to move our forces out of Iraq and make the Iraqi political leadership aware that our commitment is not open ended, that we cannot resolve their sectarian problems, and that only they can find the political resolution required to stabilize Iraq.

Kinda like the Iraq Study Group suggestions that pretty much everyone else has dismissed? And isn’t the principal mission of our forces already training, logistics, force protection and counter-terror?

Beginning Friday, December 15, and continuing through Wednesday, December 20, I will be hosting a blogging colloquium on Iraq entitled “Directions on Iraq: a Blogging Colloquium” at The Glittering Eye.

I’m thrilled with those who will be participating. Participants include:

John Burgess is a former U. S. foreign service officer who has had two tours of duty in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the first in 1981-1983 and the second 2001-2003. He reads and speaks Arabic and has spent the bulk of his career in the Middle East with assignments in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain in addition to his assignment in the KSA. His blog, Crossroads Arabia, is one of the blogosphere’s finest resources for information and commentary on the KSA.

Michael Cook is the Cleveland Dodge professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. In 2002 he was awarded the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

James Hamilton is a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. His special area of study is oil economics. His blog, Econbrowser, is a premier econblog.

Rasheed Abou Al-Samh is a Saudi-American journalist based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He is a senior editor at Arab News and a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Times, Al-Ahram Weekly, and Forbes Arabia. His blog is Rasheed’s World.

Shivaji Sondhi is a professor of physics at Princeton University.

I’m still accepting submissions. I’m especially seeking participants with knowledge of the Middle East and specialist expertise. If you’re interested, please leave contact information in the comments below or in the comments to this post at The Glittering Eye.

I don’t know if you’re as discouraged by the present political climate and the likely turn of events with respect to Iraq as I am (not to mention Iran) but I’ve been wracking what I like to think of as my brains for some time now trying to consider U. S. interests in the region, how they’re likely to be affected by a withdrawal of U. S. troops before the country can be stabilized, what other measures are available to secure those interests in the event of such a withdrawal, and so on.

I’m also discouraged by what I consider the poor level of analysis being done both in the blogosphere and in the larger world. The Iraq Study Group’s report has been somewhat disappointing, not offering much in the way of new perspectives, and I doubt that the Democrats’ forum on the subject announced a week or so ago will be a great deal better.

So rather than continue speculating myself I thought I might try to organize a blogospheric colloquium, basically a cross-blog discussion, on the subject. I’ve tried attract participants better informed than I (that leaves the field pretty open). Among the general topics I proposed were:

• military issues
• diplomatic alternatives
• regional stakes
• economics and development
• communications and information

The general format of the colloquium will be that each participant will elaborate on a topic in a post of his own (the contributions of participants without blogs of their own will be hosted here).

Participants and, indeed, all readers would be encouraged to address questions to the participants either in the pages of the participants’ blogs or here:

iraqdirections at theglitteringeye dot com

(replace “at” with * and “dot” with a period).

I will coordinate, organize, and promote. I will also convene the colloquium, host posts and discussion as required, and call the colloquium to a close.

I’m very excited by this project and hope to learn a lot. Perhaps we can contribute some substance to the discussion on this crucial subject.

Michael Kinsley dismisses as “moronic” Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

[N]o one has yet thought to accuse Israel of creating a phony country in finally acquiescing to the creation of a Palestinian state. Palestine is no Bantustan. Or if it is, it is the creation of Arabs, not Jews. Furthermore, Israel has always had Arab citizens. They are Arabs who were living in what became Israel prior to 1948 and who didn’t leave. They are a bit on display, like black conservatives at a Republican convention. Israel is fortunate that, for whatever reason, most of their compatriots fled. No doubt they suffer discrimination. Nevertheless, they are citizens with the right to vote and so on. There used to be Jews living in Arab nations, but they also fled in 1948 and subsequent years—in numbers roughly equivalent to the Arabs who fled Israel. Now there are virtually no Jews in Arab countries—even in a moderate Arab country like Jordan. How many Jews do you think there will be in the new state of Palestine, when its flag flies over a sovereign nation?

I presume that question is rhetorical.

Lisa Beyer has a powerful op-ed in Time with the provocative title “The Big Lie About the Middle East — Tell James Baker: Arab nations don’t care about the Palestinians.”

In lumping the Iraq mess in with the Palestinian problem–and suggesting the first could not be fixed unless the second was too–the Baker-Hamilton commission lent credibility to a corrosive myth: that the fundamental problem in the Arab world is the plight of the Palestinians.

It is a falsehood perpetuated not just by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who came late to the slogan after their actual beefs–Saddam with his neighbors; bin Laden with the Saudi royals–gained insufficient traction in the Arab world. The mantra is also repeated like an axiom in the U.S.–in parts of the State Department, in various think tanks, by editorial writers and Sunday talk-show hosts.

Yes, it was a great disturbance in the Arab world in the 1940s when a Jewish state was born through a U.N. vote and a war that made refugees of many Palestinians. Then the 1967 war left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and thus the Palestinians who lived there. But the pan-Arabism that once made the Palestinian cause the region’s cause is long dead, and the Arab countries have their own worries aplenty. In a decade of reporting in the region, I found it rarely took more than the arching of an eyebrow to get the most candid of Arab thinkers to acknowledge that the tears shed for the Palestinians today outside the West Bank and Gaza are of the crocodile variety. Palestinians know this best of all.

The rest of her piece explains why the myth is so corrosive in terms of the broader Middle East. It’s worth a read in its entirety.

The above, though, is enough to show that this canard has nothing to do with resolving the crisis in Iraq. While a show of neutrality on the part of the United States in the Arab-Israeli mess might have some ancillary benefit in security the cooperation of Iraq’s neighbors (although it could just as easily be seen as a sign of fecklessness and weakness) it’s going to have zero impact on the internal issues that are at the heart of 90-odd percent of the violence.

While agreement with the WaPo editorial board is usually immediate cause to question my assumptions, I nonetheless think they got it exactly right with yesterday’s essay with the subhead “The Iraq Study Group imagines a Middle East that doesn’t exist.”

It seems that Iran, at least, has read the report of the Iraq Study Group.

Iran’s foreign minister delivered a blunt challenge to the United States on Saturday, saying Tehran is willing to help U.S. troops withdraw from neighboring Iraq but only if Washington makes some tough policy changes.

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki claimed U.S. troops were responsible for at least half the violence tearing apart Iraq and that their departure would pay security dividends for the entire region. “If the United States changes its attitude, the Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to help with the withdrawal from Iraq,” Mottaki told the International Institute of Strategic Studies conference here. “Fifty percent of the problem of insecurity in Iraq is the presence of foreign troops.”

Mottaki echoed calls made last week by Iran’s top national security official, Ali Larijani, for Gulf Arab countries to eject American bases in their countries and establish a regional security pact with Iran. Mottaki went further and offered deeper cooperation with the six Gulf Arab states on energy, tourism, business and counter-narcotics.

Iran’s offers do not seem to have tempted Gulf neighbors who are apparently more worried about the dangers of living near Iran’s nuclear facilities, especially amid threats by Washington and
Israel to use military force to destroy them.

[...]

Iran’s proposal for a Gulf security alliance shows no sign of gaining traction among the region’s Arab leaders. Bahraini Foreign Minister Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa said security of the energy-rich region depends on the United States, the European Union and other major oil-importing countries.

Much of the discussion at this security conference centered on the U.S. Iraq Study Group report, and its recommendation that Washington seek Iran’s help in steering Iraq away from civil war.

William Cohen, defense secretary under President Clinton, urged Iran to push for talks with Washington. “If you forgo aspirations for nuclear weapons and cut off funding for radical elements and support the Mideast peace process, then yes, you’d be welcomed into the international community. We’d have billions of dollars going into your economy,” Cohen told the Iranians among 250 delegates from 22 countries. “If Iran is simply interested in pursuing a nuclear energy program and not weapons, that’s something the U.S. wouldn’t object to and would support.”

Well, yes. And if wishes were fishes, we’d all have some fried.

Sadly, it appears the Gulf Arabs are not treating the Iraq Study Group report with the serious respectful deference it deserves. I’m beginning to fear that the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute may not be forthcoming, either.

The major factions are close to a deal on the incredibly divisive issue of sharing oil revenues.

Iraqi officials are near agreement on a national oil law that would give the central government the power to distribute current and future oil revenues to the provinces or regions, based on their population, Iraqi and American officials say.

If enacted, the measure, drafted by a committee of politicians and ministers, could help resolve a highly divisive issue that has consistently blocked efforts to reconcile the country’s feuding ethnic and sectarian factions. Sunni Arabs, who lead the insurgency, have opposed the idea of regional autonomy for fear that they would be deprived of a fair share of the country’s oil wealth, which is concentrated in the Shiite south and Kurdish north.

The Iraq Study Group report stressed that an oil law guaranteeing an equitable distribution of revenues was crucial to the process of national reconciliation, and thus to ending the war. Without such a law, it would also be impossible for Iraq to attract the foreign investment it desperately needs to bolster its oil industry.

Officials cautioned that this was only a draft agreement, and that it could still be undermined by the ethnic and sectarian squabbling that has jeopardized other political talks. The Iraqi Constitution, for example, was stalled for weeks over small wording conflicts, and its measures are often meaningless in the chaos and violence in Iraq today.

Given the climate, “could still be undermined” should probably say “will likely be undermined.” The guerrillas have a huge stake in making sure this does not work out and it is far easier to maintain anarchy than create and maintain stability.

Still, this is a hopeful sign, for a change. The mere fact that leaders think it worth sitting down and resolving issues through political means is important.

Thomas Barnett, hardly a Polyanna on this war, sees at least a glimmer of hope here:

So long as the sectarian violence flares, there will be a natural tendency for the three groups to pull apart, especially the two stable ones (Kurds, Shiia) from the one unstable one (Sunni triangle). But this law may just be enough to help give the central government just enough reason to remain relevant in the meantime that, as things settle down over time, Iraq can survive the inevitable bloodletting that comes after you take the dictator down who had held the nation together through institutionalized violence.

A lot of caveats, to be sure.

U.S. News reports that unnamed “Former White House advisers to George H.W. Bush are keenly disappointed and concerned about the current
President Bush’s initial reaction to the report by the Iraq Study Group” which they term “dismissive.”

First, I find it amusing that these people are sniping to the press and don’t even have the intestinal fortitude to put their names in print.

Second, Bush’s public reaction to the report has been fawning praise about how “important” it is. He’s promised to treat it seriously. Shoot, he claims to have actually taken time to read it.

Third, and most importantly, almost every serious foreign policy analyst who has looked at the report has been largely dismissive of it. It’s a mishmash of pie-in-the-sky proposals and meet-in-the-middle compromises that few think offer a useful roadmap.

Now this, on the other hand, is probably true:

“We have a classic case of circling the wagons,” says a former adviser to Bush the elder. “If President Bush changes his policy in Iraq in a fundamental way, it undermines the whole premise of his presidency. I just don’t believe he will ever do that.”

Nor do I, if by “fundamental” we mean abandoning the mission. Set up summit meetings to see if he can’t get Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Persians, Sunni and Shia to grow apple trees and honeybees, and snow white turtledoves, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony? Sure. He can’t be seen as “dismissive” of such a serious and important set of recommendations, after all.

But he’s unlikely to set absurd deadlines and then abandon the Iraqis to their fate if they don’t magically achieve them.