Iraq Decapitated

A new report out by a British think tank Chatham House, which is "regarded as one of world's leading think tanks on international affairs" suggests that the Iraqi Government is rendered nearly powerless is many regions of the country.

The British think tank "urges a radical change in American and British strategy to try to rescue the situation." the BBC reports.

The summary of the Chatham House report claims :

Iraq has fractured into regional power bases. Political, security and economic power has devolved to local sectarian, ethnic or tribal political groupings. The Iraqi government is only one of several ‘state-like’ actors.

There is not ‘a’ civil war in Iraq, but many civil wars and insurgencies involving a number of communities and organizations struggling for power.

The conflicts have become internalized between Iraqis as the polarization of sectarian and ethnic identities reaches ever deeper into Iraqi society and causes the breakdown of social cohesion.

Critical destabilizing issues will come to the fore in 2007–8. Federalism, the control of oil and control of disputed territories need to be resolved.

Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have different reasons for seeing the instability in Iraq continue, and each uses different methods to influence developments.

The full report can be read at this link.

BBC reports that Dr Gareth Stansfield, an expert on the Middle East who wrote the paper also said the American troop surge is not overcoming violence but moving the violence to different areas.

7 Out Of 8 "Successful" Projects In Iraq In Shambles

Rebuilding Iraq, one failure at a time.

The New York Times is reporting that :

"In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle."

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So in other words 7 out of 8 "success stories" are now failures, so is the typical story of the entire story of the Iraq war.

It really leaves me to wonder how the Bush Administration and it's loyalist can continue to claim there are "real success stories in Iraq that the media isn't telling you."

One example is 11.8 billion that was spent on generators for an airport, now 8.6 billion dollars worth are not even working. That's a job well done!

Another example was medical workers who could not find the keys to an expensive medical incinerator, as a result medical waste including used syringes and dirty bandages were "clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system."

Here's the real kick, the Officials said they wanted to sample various projects from various regions but :

"they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit."

This, they claim means that :

"the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program."

Common sense would suggest that if 7 out of 8 projects in so called safe areas had failed then projects in areas too dangerous to visit have most likely failed as well.

But asking for common sense to be used in the war or rebuilding is like, I don't know, walking on water.