Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, said he thought "the Baker-Hamilton report is unfair and unjust." Talabani was angered by one of the many recommendations in the group's report calling for change in U.S. policy in Iraq. There were in fact 79 commendations, which if a few were adopted would offer President Bush a lifeline out of the current Iraqi quagmire. The Hamilton-Baker recommendations, if heeded, would allow for an organized withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by the first quarter of 2008.

Ironically, Talabani said the Hamilton-Baker report "undermines the sovereignty of Iraq and its constitution." President Talabani has all the right in the world to be upset and angry and frustrated and irritated. But the president of Iraq is angry at the wrong people. It's not the Americans, the military serving on the front lines in Iraq or as advisers and trainers, nor is it the politicians back in Washington he should be upset with. His anger should be directed at the groups currently railroading Iraq into an unavoidable civil war.

The militias from all sides, be they Sunni or Shiite, carry the blame for pushing Iraq to the very edge of civil war. It is those militias, and not American troops, who have been systematically undermining the infrastructure that the American forces have been trying to piece back together, one may add with tremendous difficulty.

Or perhaps he might want to look in the direction of Tehran, where according to a Pentagon source who requested anonymity, it's the mullahs who arm the Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq. Asked why they would do that, the source said "to cause havoc."

Or perhaps the Iraqi president might look at his own government that has failed to step up to the plate, unite the people, provide security for its citizens, thus facilitating an early American departure. Instead, by fueling flames of sectarian hatred, by allowing guerrilla attacks against coalition forces on the one hand, and then against rival Iraqi sects on the other, or by simply standing on the sidelines as observers, some of Iraq's security forces have contributed to the country's spiraling descent into the hell it finds itself in today.

The violence plaguing Iraq is only skimming the surface. A full-fledged civil war between Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis will unleash untold demons far more dangerous than what we have seen so far. Open warfare between the two Muslim communities in Iraq would mean without the shadow of a doubt that neighboring countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, could get dragged into a conflict giving a whole new dimension to the crisis. Saudi and Iran could become engaged in a war by proxy.

Saudi Arabia, according to more than one observer, would move to protect Iraq's Sunni minority. The Saudi military, by large inexperienced when it comes to active combat, would in fact enter the conflict -- if they do -- not as a deterrent force or a replacement to departing U.S. troops, but more likely as a militia supporting their fellow Sunnis in Iraq.

If that scenario were ever to unfold, Iran would not stand idle either. What is likely to ensue is no longer a contained civil war within one country, but an extended conflict spanning across three countries and two cultures. Incidentally, the three countries in question -- Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq -- hold respectively the world's largest, second-largest and third largest oil reserves.

An open crisis involving three major oil-producing countries would send oil prices skyrocketing.

"But maybe not," says Roger Diwan, a partner and financial advisor with PFC Energy in Washington, D.C. "Turmoil within OPEC could have the reverse effect."

To deny petro-dollars to Iran, the Saudis could flood the market with oil by increasing production, thus bringing the price down, some analysts believe.

At the same time, it's no coincidence that the Gulf Cooperation Council heads of state (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Oman) meeting this past weekend decided to explore developing nuclear energy, for "civilian use," or so they say. Why in the world would the Gulf states -- where the sun shines brightly almost 365 days a year, and where solar power can be used safely and inexpensively, suddenly find the urge to invest billions of dollars in nuclear technology?

Could we be at the dawn of a new nuclear arms race between the Arab and the Persian world, between Sunnis and Shiites? A new cold war in a very hot part of the planet.

related report

Eye on Iraq: Musical chairs in Baghdad
by Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst Washington DC (UPI) Dec 12 - It looks like curtains for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He is under attack from all sides. But when he goes nothing will change in Baghdad.

Maliki during his troubled months in office this year could do nothing to stem the widespread violence in his country. Indeed, it got vastly worse during his premiership and as a result of his policies.

But Maliki was no powerful figure for either good or evil. He was, as we predicted in these columns when he won parliamentary approval, just a piece of flotsam tossed up by the waves. The very democratic and parliamentary process that produced him as prime minister also guaranteed he would have to be a sectarian and divisive figure when he took office.

Maliki has already lost the confidence of the Bush administration because of his efforts to try and distance himself from it. The final straw was his insistence on gaining full operational control of all Iraqi military forces in his own hands.

Maliki's government had already angered Washington by cosying up to neighboring Iran. He was also dependent for most of his time in office on the parliamentary bloc loyal to Iraq's leading anti-American poltical figure, Moqtada al-Sadr. Yet now, Maliki has even lost Sadr's confidence. Sadr this week made clear he also wanted Maliki replaced.

Worst of all, during Maliki's time in office, the Iraq civil war has metastasized into a fully blown sectarian conflict between the Sunni and Shiite communities. Scores of thousands of Iraqis who could manage it have fled the country. Scores of thousands more are expected to flee in the coming weeks. Iraq has become a disaster area.

On Monday, White House Press Spokesman Tony Snow denied that the Bush administration was trying to topple Maliki and replace him. One wonders why he bothered. Everyone in Iraq knows that President George W. Bush last week bestowed his seal of approval on Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, another relatively prominent Shiite political leader from the Iraqi Islamic Party who journeyed to Washington to get Bush's seal of approval.

The U.S. aim is to produce a new Iraqi government that will squeeze Sadr out and marginalize him, while offering some carrots to moderate Iraqi Sunnis. Maliki offered them none.

Such a government, involving three Shiite parliamentary factions -- would, at least in theory, offer a new hope to bring Iraq back from the brink of a disintegration that could be virtually genocidal in its death toll, ferocity and chaos. But it looks as unlikely to succeed as Maliki or any of his predecessors did.

For over nearly four years, U.S. leaders have backed one wrong Iraqi horse after another: It started with Ahmed Chalabi, the corrupt, convicted bank embezzler beloved of Washington neo-conservatives and who had zero political support among his fellow Shiites in Iraq. A wave of other figures -- quickly promoted and equally instantaneously discarded -- followed.

The holding of full parliamentary elections a year ago was supposed to end this uncertainty, but it took a tortuous process of many months before Maliki's government was finally confirmed. By then, the very democratic process itself had polarized and fragmented Iraq far more thoroughly and disastrously than two and a half years of Sunni insurgency before it had ever managed to do.

Basic services across major areas of the country either totally collapsed or became even poorer than they had been in the years since U.S. forces toppled long-time dictator Saddam Hussein in April 2003. The showcase trial of Saddam, which Bush policymakers and neo-conservative strategists and pundits had long salivated over as the crowning set-piece of Iraq's miraculous transition from tyranny to enlightened democracy under their tutelage instead became a risable sideshow with no bearing whatsoever on the Hobbes-ian anarchy and horror into which the country had descended.

Iraq is not an almost-state, or a failed state. It is a non-state. The murderous but functional tyranny of Saddam was smashed by U.S. forces in March-April 2003. Since then, disastrously incompetent U.S. policies have failed to create a credible or functional state structure. The vast democratic parliamentary superstructure that was so painstakingly, even obsessively erected, over the past three years therefore rests on no realistic base at all. The Iraqi armed forces remain entirely unreliable and heavily infiltrated and subverted by the dominant militias, especially the Shiite ones.

It therefore does not matter who occupies the prime minister's office in Baghdad. Wisdom in Washington will only start to come when these hard truths are finally acknowledged.

Related Links
Iraq Study Group
Iraq: The first techonology war of the 21st century