Summary here.

Unknown gunmen abducted Tuesday more than 40 people, including tribal leaders and prominent persons from two Shiite towns in north of Baghdad, provincial police said.

[snip]

The convoy was carrying a delegation heading to Baghdad to meetIraq’s top officials, including Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, when they were attacked by gunmen in Tarmiya area, some 40 km north of Baghdad. Article

One particular paragraph which stood out:

Meanwhile the US blockade of several Iraqi suburbs and the subsequent traffic chaos forced the Iraqi parliament to postpone a session on Tuesday after just 95 of 275 members attended. Article

Chaos abides. Finessing semantics isn’t going to change that centrality.

In the latest of a series of reports on Iraq, Anthony Cordesman, a widely-respected expert at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, said this month the level and sources of violence in Iraq clearly meet a dictionary definition of civil war.

Ken Pollack and Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institution think tank, reached a similar conclusion two months earlier.

“The debate is over. By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war,” they said.

[snip]

When Reuters Iraq bureau chief Alastair Macdonald raised the question of terminology with Ihsan Abudlhadi, owner of Baghdad’s main English-language bookstore and a connoisseur of Iraqi phrase-making, the reply was:

“We haven’t agreed yet whether it’s a civil war or if it’s just a mess. No one can really agree on just what kind of troubles we’re having.” Article

Enlightening Q&A regarding the recent report by The Lancet (re-link to .pdf file) on deaths among Iraqis.

Hmm. Noted, but scant sourcing.

As noted a couple of days ago, Azzaman reported on the weekend details of what Washington had in mind as a possible military government for Iraq, and one of the points was there could be nine to eleven military people involved. Today’s Al-Quds al-Arabi (Tuesday October 31) tells what happened to one of these persons already, Muhammad Abdullah al-Shahwani, described as head of Iraqi intelligence. Citing sources close to Shahwani in London, the paper says US forces had to suddenly airlift him to Amman after learning of a plan to assassinate him, along with members of his group. The Americans told Shahwani to stay in Amman until further notice, and someone else has been appointed to replace him as head of Iraqi intelligence. This report says the supposed assassination plot was involved “armed militia tasked with the protection and escort of senior officials in the government and ministers, and the protection of their houses in the Green Zone”. Article

Riots in the offing?

The defence team of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein has sent a letter to US President George W. Bush warning him that Iraq will develop into ‘hell’ if the former leader is sentenced to death, one of the lawyers said Tuesday.

‘We have sent a letter to Bush urging him to realize that any verdict passed on the country’s legitimate president will turn Iraq into hell and play havoc with neighbouring countries, where peoples will not stay idle as they see Islamic Iraq set ablaze,’ Ziyad Najdawi told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The Iraqi criminal court, which two months ago concluded the trial of Saddam and six of his co-defendants in the case of Dujail, has set next Sunday as a date for issuing its ruling.

But Najdawi said that he had learnt that the court had deferred issuing the verdict until further notice, suggesting the message to Bush was the reason behind the deferment. Article

Three stories that together inform substantially more then they do individually.

#1:

A senior Iraqi security official issued a veiled threat to neighboring countries whom he accused of sponsoring insurgents who carry out deadly attacks.

“We don’t want to send booby-trapped cars for the ones that are sent to us. We are capable of that but this is not the nature of the new Iraq,” national security advisor Muwafaq al-Rubaie told reporters in neighboring Kuwait.

“Neighbors are sending death vehicles, terrorists, financial and logistical support and also plotting,” the Shiite politician said, declining to point the finger at any particular country. [cough – Sunni Saudi Arabia – cough — voxd]

“We will give them more time to reconsider their calculations … We don’t want to open fire on any country … but Iraq’s patience has a limit,” he added on the sidelines of an Iraq donors’ conference.

A senior official from a neighboring country will visit Iraq in the next few weeks to discuss a political solution, Rubaie added without elaborating. Article

#2:

The “ground is prepared” for direct talks between Iran and the United States over the situation in war-ravaged Iraq, former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami said on British television.

Khatami also said that he did not think that Iran was intervening militarily in neighbouring Iraq, despite suspicions that the country was arming Shiite insurgents in the south. Article

#3:

The US war in Iraq is a “lost battle” and the violence-ravaged nation’s “dire” plight seems certain to see it shatter along ethnic lines, an advisor to the Saudi government is warning.

The damning analysis, unveiled in a presentation at a two-day conference on US-Arab relations here, sees violence in Iraq getting worse and alleges large-scale Iranian “interference” there is set to grow.

“It is already a lost battle,” said Nawaf Obaid, Managing Director of the Saudi National Security Assessment project, at the annual policymakers conference of the National Council on US-Arab Relations which ended Tuesday.

The question in Iraq is not “if the US succeeds — it has failed by every single measure that you can think of,” said Obaid, private security and energy advisor to Saudi Ambassador to Washington Prince Turki al-Faisal.

“The failure is only compounded by the fact that we just don’t know what the endgame is.” said Obaid, head of the Riyadh-based independent consultancy which advises the Saudi government.

[snip]

“All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state,” Obaid said, adding that Saudi leaders had been trying to counter what he said were US misconceptions about Iraq.

“Unfortunately the assessment is very dire, and we don’t think there is a possibility now to avoid a potential disintegration of Iraq.”

The presentation claimed that there had been large-scale “infiltration, funding and arming” of Shiite militias by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Article

Unsaid is how much easier it is to dominate the region if there are 3 (or more) smaller, weaker states than if there is on large one.

Like a missive from Captain Obvious (emphasis added):

Growing numbers of American military officers have begun to privately question a key tenet of U.S. strategy in Iraq – that setting a hard deadline for troop reductions would strengthen the insurgency and undermine efforts to create a stable state.

[snip]

Former Pentagon official Kurt Campbell said more officers are calling for deadlines after concluding that the indefinite presence of U.S. forces enables the Shiite-run Iraqi government to avoid making compromises.

“There is a new belief that the biggest problem that we face is that our forces are the sand in the gears creating problems,” said Campbell, coauthor of a book on national security policy. “We are making things worse by giving the Iraqis a false sense of security at the governing level.”

[snip]

Some officers who have served in Iraq believe that much of the Iraqi government is not functioning effectively. Finding ways to force the sectarian factions to put aside their differences and focus on improving security and basic services must be the top priority in Iraq, these officers say. Without government reform, the Iraqi security forces are unlikely to ever be strong enough to take on the insurgency or the sectarian militias.

“It’s basic counterinsurgency,” said a military officer who has served in Baghdad and did not want to publicly disagree with the president’s stated policy. “You have to have a trusted, capable government.” Article

Ye old scribe very rarely makes much mention of polls, but the numbers are so unassailably (and rightly) stacked against the woebegone G. Walker administration that this one is noted:

Some 70.2 percent of those asked disagreed with a statement U.S. plans for Iraq after Saddam Hussein was deposed were adequate; 15.8 percent agreed. The divide was much greater among self-described Democrats, 92.2 percent of whom said post-war planning was inadequate.

[snip]

The data were only slightly better for the Bush administration regarding whether Iraq`s occupation has been ‘handled competently.’ Nearly two-thirds — 62.5 percent — disagreed and 25.8 percent of those asked agreed. Article

Frankly, it should be called the “All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men Face-saving Group” or if that’s too long, keep its acronym – ISG – as that is perfectly usable for Iraq Spin Group.

The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, named after part-time diplomatic illusionists James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, doesn`t have an Iraq exit rabbit to pull out of the hat. ISG`s volunteer helpers have been told mum`s the word until the American people have spoken Nov. 7. But some are speaking out, albeit anonymously. They feel precious time is being wasted at a time when each day counts for the inevitable shift in strategy.

[snip]

Other ISG staffers are suggesting the United States should subsume the Iraq problem within a larger set of regional issues and treat the stabilization of Iraq as only one part of a new grand strategy for the Middle East as a whole. This, they say, should be done by enlisting the interest and support of some parties in the region who are enjoying the spectacle of American disgrace and humiliation — e.g., Iran, Syria and Palestine.

Short of such bold initiatives, the group of restless ISG sherpas believe the United States is headed straight toward a trainwreck that ‘will hurt many more governments and individuals than just the United States and the poor Iraqi people.’ Article

Noted FYI, from a previous quagmire:

The principal difference between a humiliating retreat and a great victory lies in thorough control of the media. Remember, only the enemy will know what actually occurred – so make sure no smart-ass reporter asks them for their opinions, and of course restrict their access to all media in languages anyone speaks.

One must be careful not to create any impression of failure. A country that has been brought freedom and democracy by US troops yet has failed to embrace these gifts has only itself to blame. Thus emphasis must be placed on the uselessness and ingratitude of the natives for any chaos and destruction that remains when our brave soldiers leave. Source