The real hub of the "axis of evil"

The hub of the Bush's axis of evil is not Iran, not even Pakistan. It's tyrannical regime of the Bush crime family's good friends the Saudis.
BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.

The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations that Britain had broken international anti-bribery treaties.

Bryan over at Hot Air gets it right:

That’s a threat of war. And it’s not the freelance work of low-level hacks.

The Saudis are indeed the center of the Jihad against the west - both personalities and money. It is the home of the extremist Wahhabism, the creed upon which the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded. We have seen the enemy and it's not Iran, it's Saudi Arabia. And if you think that the Saudis are going to let an Iran friendly Shia government take hold in Iraq you truly are delusional.

With Friends Like These

Or Who's The Enemy Again?
The Bush administration continues to say that Iran is the center of the "axis of evil". In reality of course it's the Bush family friends, the Saudis who are the Hub of the axis of Islamic terrorism.
Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror
The desert kingdom supplies the cash and the killers

Yet wealthy Saudis remain the chief financiers of worldwide terror networks. “If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,” said Stuart Levey, the US Treasury official in charge of tracking terror financing.

Extremist clerics provide a stream of recruits to some of the world’s nastiest trouble spots.

An analysis by NBC News suggested that the Saudis make up 55% of foreign fighters in Iraq. They are also among the most uncompromising and militant.

Half the foreign fighters held by the US at Camp Cropper near Baghdad are Saudis. They are kept in yellow jumpsuits in a separate, windowless compound after they attempted to impose sharia on the other detainees and preached an extreme form of Wahhabist Islam.

In recent months, Saudi religious scholars have caused consternation in Iraq and Iran by issuing fatwas calling for the destruction of the great Shi’ite shrines in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, some of which have already been bombed. And while prominent members of the ruling al-Saud dynasty regularly express their abhorrence of terrorism, leading figures within the kingdom who advocate extremism are tolerated.

Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan, the chief justice, who oversees terrorist trials, was recorded on tape in a mosque in 2004, encouraging young men to fight in Iraq. “Entering Iraq has become risky now,” he cautioned. “It requires avoiding those evil satellites and those drone aircraft, which own every corner of the skies over Iraq. If someone knows that he is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight, and if his intention is to raise up the word of God, then he is free to do so.”

The Saudis have done little to stop this.

According to Levey, not one person identified by America or the United Nations as a terrorist financier has been prosecuted by Saudi authorities.

On the other side of the arch villain Iran things are not to rosy either.
Musharraf Leaves White House in Lurch

For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world.

On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly. Now the White House is stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity about the way forward.

General Musharraf’s move to seize emergency powers and abandon the Constitution left Bush administration officials close to their nightmare: an American-backed military dictator who is risking civil instability in a country with nuclear weapons and an increasingly alienated public.

So a country that already has nukes it teetering on chaos and their is the very real risk that really crazy people will get the bomb.

Good job George, Dick and Condi!!!

So How Goes That Global War On Terror

We saw yesterday that General Pretaeus would not or could not answer John Warner's question "Do you feel that [Iraq war] is making America safer"? . Of course it hasn't, in fact it has made us less safe by creating new recruits for the group that was actually responsible for 911 ans inflaming much of the Muslim world. One indication of that can be found here:
Poll: Bin Laden tops Musharraf in Pakistan

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf -- a key U.S. ally -- is less popular in his own country than al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to a poll of Pakistanis conducted last month by an anti-terrorism organization.

Additionally, nearly three-fourths of poll respondents said they oppose U.S. military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan, according to results from the poll conducted by the independent polling organization Terror Free Tomorrow.

"We have conducted 23 polls all over the Muslim world, and this is the most disturbing one we have conducted," said Ken Ballen, the group's head. "Pakistan is the one Muslim nation that has nuclear weapons, and the people who want to use them against us -- like the Taliban and al Qaeda -- are more popular there than our allies like Musharraf."

The poll was conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow by D3 Systems of Vienna, Virginia., and the Pakistan Institute for Public Opinion. Interviews were conducted August 18-29, face-to-face with 1,044 Pakistanis across 105 urban and rural sampling points in all four provinces across the nation. Households were randomly selected.

According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating. Musharraf's support is 38 percent. U.S. President George W. Bush's approval: 9 percent.

Al-Qaeda may have decentralized but it is stronger and more dangerous than ever. Worldwide terrorist attacks have increased significantly since the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And what about those good Bush friends, the Saudis.
U.S.: Saudis Still Filling Al Qaeda's Coffers

Despite six years of promises, U.S. officials say Saudi Arabia continues to look the other way at wealthy individuals identified as sending millions of dollars to al Qaeda.

"If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia," Stuart Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury in charge of tracking terror financing, told ABC News.

Despite some efforts as a U.S. ally in the war on terror, Levey says Saudi Arabia has dropped the ball. Not one person identified by the United States and the United Nations as a terror financier has been prosecuted by the Saudis, Levey says.

The invasion of Iraq was never about making the US or the world safe. It was always about Dick Cheney's lust for hegemony over the oil rich middle east.

Is it time to attack Saudi Arabia?

While the Bush administration and the neocons are rattling their sabers at Iran and Syria it appears that most of the foreign fighters are from Saudi Arabia.
Saudis' role in Iraq insurgency outlined
Sunni extremists from Saudi Arabia make up half the foreign fighters in Iraq, many suicide bombers, a U.S. official says.

BAGHDAD — Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers.

About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.

Fighters from Saudi Arabia are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than those of any other nationality, said the senior U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity. It is apparently the first time a U.S. official has given such a breakdown on the role played by Saudi nationals in Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgency.

He said 50% of all Saudi fighters in Iraq come here as suicide bombers. In the last six months, such bombings have killed or injured 4,000 Iraqis.

And what about our friends the Saudis?

The situation has left the U.S. military in the awkward position of battling an enemy whose top source of foreign fighters is a key ally that at best has not been able to prevent its citizens from undertaking bloody attacks in Iraq, and at worst shares complicity in sending extremists to commit attacks against U.S. forces, Iraqi civilians and the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.

Saudi leaders in early February undercut U.S. diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute by brokering, in Mecca, an agreement to form a Fatah-Hamas "unity" government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And King Abdullah took Americans by surprise by declaring at an Arab League gathering that the U.S. presence in Iraq was illegitimate.

U.S. officials remain sensitive about the relationship. Asked why U.S. officials in Iraq had not publicly criticized Saudi Arabia the way they had Iran or Syria, the senior military officer said, "Ask the State Department. This is a political juggernaut."

This has resulted in Professor Bainbridge asking a very serious question or two.

It makes one wonder whether the case for regime change in Saudi Arabia was (and is) a lot stronger than the one for regime chane in Iraq. Certainly, it suggests that countering Wahhabism should have been Bush's first priority. It'll also add fuel to the fire of conspiracy theories, like this one:

Both then-president Bush and the current president have had personal and deep financial ties with the Saudi royal family. Author and journalist Craig Unger documents $1.4 billion that has “made its way” from the Saudi royal family to “entities tied” to the Bush family, according to Unger’s controversial book "House of Bush, House of Saud.”

Unger contends that the documented oil holdings and affiliations of both Bush presidents has led to a policy of inaction in the post-Sept. 11 world.

“There is a fundamental piece of logic missing in the American conversation ... the Saudis played a big role in terrorism, that the Bushes have very, very close to the Saudis both in business terms, personal terms, and in public policy. And it has a resulted in a non-cracking down in the Saudi role on terror,” said Unger, who lives only blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood.

Update
As my friend and partner The Gun Toting Liberal points out even some of the wingnuts are upset with Bush over this.

More bad news for the Cheney

There have been indications that Secretary of State Condi Rice and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates now have the controls of the foreign policy machine and The Lord of Darkness and his evil Orcs don't. Via Laura Rozen we have this from Swoop that would seem to indicate the Saudi's have also given Cheney the cold shoulder.
Iran: The Sunnis Abandon Ship

Divisions continue among top officials about the way forward on Iran. On June 1st, Secretary of State Rice found herself in the awkward position of having to rebut charges that Vice-President Cheney was undermining her approach of diplomacy and sanctions. Administration contacts confirm that Rice’s approach currently enjoys support from President Bush and Secretary of Defense Gates. But Cheney and officials close to him, especially Elliot Abrams at the National Security Council, still believe that their military-based “solution” will ultimately prove necessary. They have, however, suffered a recent setback in what we have described as their “Sunni strategy” to build support from the US’ conservative Sunni Arab allies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf States) for a belligerent approach to Iran. This strategy was based on the Sunni fear of an ascendant Iran and of an Iraq falling into the Iranian sphere as another Shia major oil producer. Abrams worked closely with Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, the Saudi National Security Adviser, to push this plan forward. We hear that this has now been shelved at the insistence, we are told, of Saudi King Abdullah. The latter has distanced himself from Bandar who is spending much of his time outside Saudi Arabia at his homes in London and the US. The failure of this strategy to build regional support for confronting Iran has strengthened the hand of those who favor a measured approach to Tehran.

Now I must admit I've never heard of Swoop but this does fit with reports we have heard that Prince Bandar has fallen from favor.

So, will Dick Cheney decide to spend more time with his family before or after his approaching heart surgery or will they simply lose the key to that secret bunker for the next 18 months. Question two, how does this relate to the lack of pardon for Scooter Libby?

On The Road With The Lord of Darkness

If there is anyone who has less credibility than George W. Bush it would be Dick Cheney - the architect of the debacle in the Middle East. Well Dick has taken a little road trip to throw around the influence he no longer has. Cernig at Newshoggers and Swopa at Needlenose have the details.

Democracy Iraqi Style - Dysfunctional

There has been a great deal of talk about the future Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. There was an interesting reference to this in the David Ignatius column I referenced below.

Abdullah's criticism of the "illegitimate" American presence in Iraq reflects the Saudi leader's deep misgivings about U.S. strategy there. Saudi sources say the king has given up on the ability of Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to overcome sectarian divisions and unite the country. The Saudi leadership is also said to believe that the U.S. troop surge is likely to fail, deepening the danger of all-out civil war in Iraq.

The Saudis appear to favor replacing the Maliki government, which they see as dominated by Iranian-backed Shiite religious parties, and are quietly backing former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and ex-Baathist who has support among Iraqi Sunnis. Allawi's advisers say that his strategy is to exploit tensions within the Shiite religious alliance and form a new ruling coalition that would be made up of Sunnis, Kurds and secular Shiites. Allawi's camp believes he is close to having enough votes, thanks in part to Saudi political and financial support.

The Bush administration appears to have little enthusiasm for an Allawi putsch, despite its frustration with Maliki. U.S. officials fear that a change of government in Baghdad would only deepen the political disarray there and encourage new calls for the withdrawal of troops.

Now nearly everyone recognizes that al-Maliki is a totally dysfunctional leader. The reality is Ayad Allawi had little support when the Iraqis went to the polls. So what will be the reaction of the Shiites if Allawi should replace al-Maliki?

The Only Way To End The Occupation....

....Is To End The Rule Of The Bush/Cheney Cabal.
David Ignatius has an Op Ed in the Washington Post today on Dick (Lord of Darkness) Cheney's trip to the Middle East - specifically to Saudi Arabia.

The Cheney visit is aimed partly at mutual reassurance. Both sides want to reaffirm the alliance, despite disagreements over Iraq policy and the Palestinian issue. The Saudis also want to establish an additional channel for communication so they can avoid misunderstandings that have sometimes arisen when the primary intermediary is Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the freewheeling former Saudi ambassador to Washington who is now national security adviser.

Abdullah had seemed to be distancing himself from Washington in some recent comments. In February, he broke with U.S. efforts to isolate the radical Palestinian group Hamas by sponsoring the Mecca Agreement that created a Palestinian "unity government" fusing Hamas with the more moderate Fatah. In March, he surprised U.S. officials by calling the military occupation of Iraq "illegitimate" in a speech to an Arab League summit in Riyadh. He also nixed plans for a White House dinner in April.

Abdullah's criticism of the "illegitimate" American presence in Iraq reflects the Saudi leader's deep misgivings about U.S. strategy there. Saudi sources say the king has given up on the ability of Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to overcome sectarian divisions and unite the country. The Saudi leadership is also said to believe that the U.S. troop surge is likely to fail, deepening the danger of all-out civil war in Iraq.

And then there is this:

The ferment in the region is driven partly by the perception that U.S. troops are on the way out, no matter what the Bush administration says. To dampen such speculation, Bush is said to have told the Saudis that America will not withdraw from Iraq during his presidency. "That gives us 18 months to plan," said one Saudi source.

So there is a time line but it's not September, 2007 but January, 2009. That would seem to fit with recent comments by Condolezza Rice and this;
Commanders in Iraq See 'Surge' Into '08

Pentagon to Deploy 35,000 Replacement Troops
The Pentagon announced yesterday that 35,000 soldiers in 10 Army combat brigades will begin deploying to Iraq in August as replacements, making it possible to sustain the increase of U.S. troops there until at least the end of this year.

U.S. commanders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that heightened troop levels, announced by President Bush in January, will need to last into the spring of 2008. The military has said it would assess in September how well its counterinsurgency strategy, intended to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, is working.

"The surge needs to go through the beginning of next year for sure," said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the day-to-day commander for U.S. military operations in Iraq. The new requirement of up to 15-month tours for active-duty soldiers will allow the troop increase to last until spring, said Odierno, who favors keeping experienced forces in place for now.

Bottom line - we will have 100,000 plus troops in Iraq as long as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are in office. If you want to end the US occupation of Iraq you must prematurely end the regime of Bush and Cheney.

Update
Our friend Cernig has a well deserved I Hate To Say I Told You So... over at NewsHoggers

The Saudi Card

The US, and yes the Bush family, has had no better friend in the Middle East than Saudi Arabia. It appears that the Bush/Cheney cabal has screwed things up so badly in the region that even that friendship is on the rocks. The go between has been Saudi Prince Bandar who has been the eyes, ears and mouthpiece for the Americans in Saudi Arabia. It now appears that Bandar is no longer speaking for King Abdullah and is in fact Sounding Off Key.

Bush administration officials have been scratching their heads over steps taken by Prince Bandar’s uncle, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, that have surprised them by going against the American playbook, after receiving assurances to the contrary from Prince Bandar during secret trips he made to Washington.

For instance, in February, King Abdullah effectively torpedoed plans by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a high-profile peace summit meeting between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, by brokering a power-sharing agreement with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas that did not require Hamas to recognize Israel or forswear violence. The Americans had believed, after discussions with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis were on board with the strategy of isolating Hamas.

American officials also believed, again after speaking with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis might agree to direct engagement with Israel as part of a broad American plan to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. King Abdullah countermanded that plan.

Most bitingly, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh three weeks ago, the king condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” The Bush administration, caught off guard, was infuriated, and administration officials have found Prince Bandar hard to reach since.

Since the Iraq war and the attendant plummeting of America’s image in the Muslim world, King Abdullah has been striving to set a more independent and less pro-American course, American and Arab officials said. And that has steered America’s relationship with its staunchest Arab ally into uncharted waters. Prince Bandar, they say, may no longer be able to serve as an unerring beacon of Saudi intent.

“The problem is that Bandar has been pursuing a policy that was music to the ears of the Bush administration, but was not what King Abdullah had in mind at all,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel who is now head of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

And King Abdullah has delivered yet another blow to the administration:
Saudi King Declines to Receive Iraqi Leader

In a serious rebuff to U.S. diplomacy, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has refused to receive Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on the eve of a critical regional summit on the future of the war-ravaged country, Iraqi and other Arab officials said yesterday.

The Saudi leader's decision reflects the growing tensions between the oil-rich regional giants, the deepening skepticism among Sunni leaders in the Middle East about Iraq's Shiite-dominated government, and Arab concern about the prospects of U.S. success in Iraq, the sources said. The Saudi snub also indicates that the Maliki government faces a creeping regional isolation unless it takes long-delayed actions, Arab officials warn.

For the United States, the Saudi cold shoulder undermines hopes of healing regional tensions between Sunni- and Shiite-dominated governments and producing a new spirit of cooperation on Iraq at the summit, to be held Thursday and Friday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the sources warn.

The Bush administration has invested significantly in the Egypt meeting, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will attend. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said in a television interview last Thursday that the United States holds a "lot of hope" that the conference will serve as a catalyst for garnering regional and international support for solving Iraq's problems.

What we see here is that none of the players in the region thinks that the Bush administration can do anything positive in the region. They are working behind the scenes without the Bush administration to try to broker some stability. The Iraqis have been talking to the Iranians, the Saudis have been talking to the Iranians - leaving the incompetent Bush administration out of the loop.

The end game may turn out to be just the opposite of what the Bush/Cheney cabal and the neocons had in mind - a middle east in which the US has little or no influence.

Cernig has a great analysis over at NewsHoggers,
Zen and The Art Of Iraqi Reconcilliation

Quote of the Day

The New York Times has picked up the story about Saudi King Abdullah referring to the US involvement in Iraq as an illegal occupation I discussed below. The Times article, Saudi King Condemns U.S. Occupation of Iraq, doesn't really have any additional details but does have some observations from from the region. This one deserves the quote of the day.

Turki al-Rasheed, who runs a organization that promotes democracy in Saudi Arabia, said the king was “saying we may be moving on the same track, but our ends are different.”

“Bush wants to make it look like he is solving the problem, the king wants to actually solve the problems,” Mr. Rasheed said.

That could just about describe the entire Bush presidency.

Short on Friends

The Saudis have made no secret of their unhappiness with Bush administrations handling of Iraq. Well it seems they are going public.
Saudi king slams 'illegitimate occupation' of Iraq

RIYADH (AFP) - Saudi King Abdullah, whose country is a close US ally, on Wednesday slammed the "illegitimate foreign occupation" of Iraq in an opening speech to the annual Arab summit in Riyadh.

"In beloved Iraq, blood is being shed among brothers in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation, and ugly sectarianism threatens civil war," Abdullah said.

He also said that Arab nations, which are planning to revive a five-year-old Middle East peace plan at the summit, would not allow any foreign force to decide the future of the region.
In the past, Saudi leaders including Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal have often criticised US policy in Iraq but have never described its presence there as "illegitimate."

And they are distancing themselves from Bush.
Bush's Royal Trouble
Why Is King Abdullah Saying No to Dinner?

President Bush enjoys hosting formal state dinners about as much as having a root canal. Or proposing tax increases. So his decision to schedule a mid-April White House gala for Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah signified the president's high regard for an Arab monarch who is also a Bush family friend.

Now the White House ponders what Abdullah's sudden and sparsely explained cancellation of the dinner signifies. Nothing good -- especially for Condoleezza Rice's most important Middle East initiatives -- is the clearest available answer.

Abdullah's bowing out of the April 17 event is, in fact, one more warning sign that the Bush administration's downward spiral at home is undermining its ability to achieve its policy objectives abroad. Friends as well as foes see the need, or the chance, to distance themselves from the politically besieged Bush.

And the Saudis have been talking to Iran, a sure indication that they don't think anything positive will come out of the Bush White House.

Abdullah's reluctance to be seen socializing at the White House this spring reflects two related dynamics: a scampering back by the Saudis to their traditional caution in trying to balance regional forces, and their displeasure with negative U.S. reaction to their decision to return to co-opting or placating foes.

Abdullah gave a warm welcome to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Riyadh in early March, not long after the Saudis pressured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas into accepting a political accord that entrenches Hamas in an unwieldy coalition government with Abbas's Fatah movement.

"The Saudis surprised us by going that far," explained one White House official in a comment that reached -- and irritated -- Saudi officials. So don't count on Abdullah to put new force behind his long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative at the Arab summit scheduled this week in Riyadh.

We see that George W. Bush is a lame duck not only on the home front but on the international front as well.

Quote of the day

We might also call this post by Steve Soto the most bang for the bandwidth since it's the entire post.

Sunni insurgents are now using chlorine gas bombs against Iraqis. These of course would be the same Sunni insurgents who are financed and armed by Saudi Arabia, and not Iran.

So which country are we kowtowing to, and which country are we preparing to attack?

How can you avoid defeat.....

.....when you can't define victory?
The definition of "victory" in Iraq has certainly been a moving target over the last 4 plus years. According to the original justification we won 3 plus years ago - Saddam is out of power, and now dead, and no threat from WMDs, of course there never was a threat. It seems now that the latest justification is to defeat the terrorist and insurgency that was created by the initial invasion and the following mis-management. The entire Democracy thing was just a passing fad. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the new "victory" as seen by the neocons and the Bush administration is to postpone the inevitable withdrawal long enough so they can blame it on the terrorist loving Democrats and the other 60 plus percent of the Americans who think it's time to get out. The New York Times has a commentary today that I agree with for the most part.
On to the Hard Part on Iraq

President Bush lost touch long ago with Iraq’s political reality — not to mention Americans’ anguish and disbelief at his mismanagement of the war. So we welcome the House of Representatives’ long-overdue attempt to shake some sense into Mr. Bush with a resolution opposing his decision to send another 20,000 combat troops to fight this disastrous war without any plan to end it.

Yet yesterday’s vote, in which 17 Republicans joined the Democrats to produce a margin of 246 to 182, was the easy part. It takes no great courage or creativity for a politician to express continuing support for the troops and opposition to a vastly unpopular and unpromising military escalation. Even if the Senate manages to overcome its procedural self-hobbling and approve a similar resolution, the war and the mismanagement will go on.

The next necessary steps will require harder thinking and harder choices. Congress needs to do what Mr. Bush is refusing to do: link further financing for the war to the performance of Iraq’s Shiite-led government, which is making no serious effort to rescue its country from civil war.

Congress needs to impose clear benchmarks and rigorous timetables, insisting that the Iraqi government stop equivocating and start disarming sectarian militias, adopt a formula to share oil revenues equitably and end employment discrimination against Sunni Arabs. Congress must be prepared to cut off financing if the Iraqis refuse.

This is indeed what needs to be done and the Administration and hegemonic war mongering neocons will resist. It was never their intention to withdraw from Iraq. A, if not the, primary reason for the invasion and occupation was to establish a permanent military presence in the region. So how to halt the insanity? I agree with the Times that Murtha's plan is not the answer. A more effective way to "slow bleed" it might be to make them pay for it. How about a 5% war surcharge on all income over $200,000? That would get some-one's attention. Strict timetables and and consequences if they are not met as the Times suggests would also be better than Murtha's plan. The timetables would not be met as the Shiite government has no desire to have a unified government so after perhaps a brief respite the violence will once again intensify. With the Shia militia's sitting it out for a while the surge will for all purposes be an ethnic purge of Sunnis which will result in Saudi Arabia and Egypt pumping more arms and supplies into the country. The real hope may be the rumored talks between Iran and the Saudis, neither one of which really wants a regional war and both know that the Bush administration's policy will eventually result in one.