Things are coming unglued for Washington in Middle East

Saturday » November 3 » 2007
Since this has been posted there has been further ungluing with Musharaff declaring a state of emergency. This perhaps explains why Bhutto decided to visit her family in Dubai at this particular time!
The hypocrisy of the US over the PJAK is transparent. There are bad (Al Qaeda), neutral (PKK) and good (PJAK) terrorists. The distinction is based not upon their terrorist actions but on their relationship to US policy.


Things are coming unglued for Washington in Middle East

Jonathan Manthorpe
Vancouver Sun


Friday, November 02, 2007


The signs are everywhere that a new, unpredictable and dangerous phase is beginning in Washington's "war on terror" and the fallout from the invasion of Iraq.

In the Middle East, much of the carefully balanced structure of alliances and loyalties has been thrown into confusion by NATO member Turkey's political imperative to confront Kurdish separatist terrorists operating out of northern Iraq.

The outcome, which could see an alliance between U.S. ally Turkey and Washington's "axis of evil" enemy Iran to battle their common irritant, the Kurds, will depend on a meeting between President George W. Bush and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Monday.

If Bush cannot give Erdogan an absolute commitment that American troops in northern Iraq will hand over the 150 or so key leaders of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) who have been sending terror teams over the border in recent weeks, the Turkish leader has a mandate from parliament to go after them himself, and he has the troops to do it.

Washington has tried this week to dilute its refusal to hand over PKK leaders -- despite labelling them "terrorists" -- by giving Ankara intelligence information about the disposition of the PKK camps.

But Washington is in a fix because the Kurdish region of northern Iraq is the only part of the country that is relatively secure.

Yet hypocrisy blossoms even here. At the same time as Washington considers the PKK "terrorists" it is arming and supporting another Kurdish separatist group, the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK).

In Washington's eyes the PJAK are freedom fighters, not terrorists, because they are seeking autonomy for the Kurdish regions in northern Iran, America's enemy.

So it is hardly surprising the Turkish foreign minister flew to Tehran this week to lay the groundwork for an alliance with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad is at the top of his game of sowing dissent and confusion, even as the Bush administration makes increasingly feeble-sounding threats of war to prevent Tehran developing the capacity to make nuclear weapons.

Russia and China have criticized as unhelpful a new raft of unilateral sanctions by the Bush administration against the Iranian leadership. And the director of the International Atomic Energy Authority, Mohamed ElBaradei, has told the White House to cool its rhetoric about an impending "World War III" because Iran is nowhere near being able to make a bomb.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, whose return from exile two weeks ago was meant to herald a new era of stable democracy, has fled back to her family in Dubai.

Her hasty departure on Thursday follows the opening up of a new front by the Taliban.

About 700 people have died in suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan's cities since July when, at Washington's urging, government forces began concerted attacks on Taliban bases in the vast and inhospitable tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

The Taliban, like their supporters in Pakistan and Afghanistan where Canadian forces are battling them around Kandahar, are largely ethnic Pashtun, though they continue to attract hundreds of would-be jihadists from Muslim countries elsewhere.

One result of the Pakistani government military operations has been to solidify Pashtun ethnic loyalties and provoke the Taliban into taking the suicide bomb war into the heartland of the country.

At least 123 people were killed at a rally marking Bhutto's return on Oct. 19. On Wednesday seven people died in an attack at the military headquarters city of Rawalpindi and Thursday eight people were killed when a bomber rammed an air force bus in Punjab province.

Pakistan is on a knife edge awaiting the ruling of the Supreme Court on the legality of Gen. Pervez Musharraf's selection as president last month. Musharraf seized power and established a military dictatorship in 1999, but is attempting to become a civilian president as part of the U.S.-brokered deal with Bhutto, who would be prime minister.

But with the strong possibility that the court will rule against him, and in the face of the Taliban's nationwide insurrection, Musharraf is known to be contemplating a declaration of martial law and ditching the Bhutto deal.

Bhutto may well view family life in Dubai with renewed fondness.

jmanthorpe@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2007








Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

The rest of the article can be found here.
Unlike most mainstream articles Chomsky just assumes that the purpose of US Mid-East policy is to control energy resources. He notes later that the US is probably working within Iran to support separatist movements---many of them using terrorist tactics.

A predator becomes more dangerous when wounded

Washington's escalation of threats against Iran is driven by a determination to secure control of the region's energy resources

By Noam Chomsky

03/09/07 "The Guardian" --- In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq - a country otherwise free from any foreign interference - on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.

In the cold war-like mentality in Washington, Tehran is portrayed as the pinnacle in the so-called Shia crescent that stretches from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon, through Shia southern Iraq and Syria. And again unsurprisingly, the "surge" in Iraq and escalation of threats and accusations against Iran is accompanied by grudging willingness to attend a conference of regional powers, with the agenda limited to Iraq.
Presumably this minimal gesture toward diplomacy is intended to allay the growing fears and anger elicited by Washington's heightened aggressiveness. These concerns are given new substance in a detailed study of "the Iraq effect" by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, revealing that the Iraq war "has increased terrorism sevenfold worldwide". An "Iran effect" could be even more severe.

For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the US.

Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world.

To Washington, Tehran's principal offence has been its defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the hostage crisis at the US embassy. In retribution, Washington turned to support Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran, which left hundreds of thousands dead. Then came murderous sanctions and, under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts.

Last July, Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, US support was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the US-Israel invasion is that Hizbullah's rockets could be a deterrent to a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed. Iran cannot defend itself against US attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them the British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three".

Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters. The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. It has been unable to establish a reliable client state within, and cannot withdraw without facing the possible loss of control of the Middle East's energy resources.

Countdown for Iran

The subtitle: When Commonsense is Nonsense about sums up US mid-east policy. Zdnet often has interesting articles.

ZNet | Iran
Countdown for Iran
When Commonsense is Nonsense

by Ramzy Baroud; February 13, 2007

The relationship between Iran and the United States is one of peculiar temperament: intense but accommodating at times, barefaced and seemingly self-destructive at others.

Currently, the latter estimation rings truer: the US naval military build up in the east Mediterranean and the Gulf, conjoined with an intense and sinister propaganda campaign that is being drummed up at home, among other signals, are all pointing to one ill-fated conclusion: the Bush administration, entranced in its foolishness, has decided to discard, and in its entirety, the Baker-Hamilton recommendations; instead of engaging Iran politically, the US is opting to engage it militarily.

Is it possible that the increasingly prevailing analyses are true, as fluently communicated in a recent commentary by Australian journalist John Pilger, that the Bush administration is gearing up for an attack against Iran as a way of “buying time for its disaster in Iraq”?

Pilger suggests another motivating factor for Bush’s new possible war: “As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, neocon fanatics such as Vice-President Cheney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring.”

But how can attacking Iran buy the ‘Bushites’ time, if they, more than any one of us know the deeply entrenched Iranian presence and influence in Iraq, often directly over prominent elements of the pro-American Shia government: one of whom is the indestructible Abdel Aziz Al Hakim?

“Al Hakim spent 20 years in Iran prior to the fall of Saddam and is clearly allied to the Mullahs,” writers US commentator Mike Whitney. “His militia, the Badr Brigade, was trained by the Iranian Republican Guards (as well as the CIA) and is perhaps the most feared death squad in all of Iraq. Al Hakim’s militia operates out of the Iraqi interior ministry and is deeply engaged in the purging of Sunnis from Baghdad.”

Isn’t it rational to envisage that an attack on Iran would upset the cozy relations that the Americans have cultivated with al-Hakim and such disreputable characters, thus lead to further destabilisation of Iraq, to more of the same unmitigated violence, where well over 3,000 US soldiers, nearly 1,000 contractors have met their doom, not counting the 45 thousand who were evacuated due to injuries and other medical emergencies, as indicated by Iraqbodycount.org?

US sources claim that innumerable Iraqis receive their salaries from Tehran (that is aside from the alleged 40,000 Iranian agents in Iraq, which the US media ceaselessly talks about), an indication of Iran’s incessant efforts to obtain the loyalty of many of Iraq’s Shia, and to dig into such valuable human reserves whenever needed, such as in the case of a war with the United States.

Considering Iran’s “natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq”, as accurately depicted by Pilger, by provoking a military showdown with Iran, the US is condemned to broaden its military confrontation in Iraq, which would then include Shia as well as Sunni, in a most imprudent barter to achieve an impossible military mission in Iran. Since airpower and commando style ‘surgical’ operations inside Iranian territories -- that would most likely involve some Israeli special army units -- are all that the US can conjure up at the moment, for ground troops are no longer a palpable option (half of the recently announced US military surge of 21,000 troops in Iraq will constitute from the same soldiers who are already serving in the country, simply by prolonging their tours and cancelling some vacations) one can safely conclude that any US military adventure in Iran will bring an indecisive outcome, at best, if not a wholesale disaster, a most likely possibility.

How about the other suggestion, that neocon fanatics believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring?

This suggestion would also seem doubtful, for the neocon’s war architects are still scrambling to avoid the blame of the Iraq fiasco and are at odds with Bush himself and his war generals, using their wide sway over US mainstream media to blame the president for all the ills that have befallen the country -- ills that were born mostly from their own ominous war stratagems and their unwarranted commitment to Israel’s security at the expense of their country’s own. How can such a group of intellectuals still effectively hold sufficient clout to lead the US into another ill-advised war? Moreover, how can Cheney and his discredited ilk even contemplate the seizure of Iran’s oil if Iraq’s oil industry is still in shambles and has proven ineffective to settle the heavy bill of war, which is moving its way toward the half trillion dollar mark?

Considering these difficult questions, one must assume that any attack on Iraq is both irrational from a military viewpoint and self-defeating from a political one. However, the quandary with any political analysis of this subject that consults reason or even Machiavellian realpolitik is that it fails to consider history, and in this case, recent history which taught us that the Bush administration functions in a vacuum, separate from commonsense or any other kind of sense. It was around this time, some four years ago, that many hoped that the American military buildup in the Gulf region was aimed at strengthening the US political position against Iraq, to simply convey to former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that the US ‘means business’. It was clear from the outset to any even-headed observer that a war against Iraq would destabilise the region and harm the United States’ overall interests in the Middle East. I stated that numerous times on American radio programmes, receiving all sorts of censure for being anti-American and unpatriotic.

Now, we stand at the same critical junction, four years later, as US news networks are readying for another awesome fireworks show, this time over Tehran; dehumanisation of the Iranians has already begun; the public is being fed with all kinds of half-truths and all sorts of rubbish about the Islamic Republic and its people; insanity has returned and the voices of reasons are again, labelled, shunned and marginalised. But for obvious reasons, this time around, war is an evident mistake, a fact that should irk and make every sensible American, every Congressman, every commentator question the wisdom of a new war while the country is on the verge of defeat in another.

Such a reality suggests that the Bush administration is working against the interests of his own people and makes Pilger’s analysis the more poignant; indeed, as irrational as it may seem, the US could very much be on its way to war with Iran.

But as explained by Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998-2005, “getting into Iraq and defeating Saddam was easy. But today, America is stuck there and knows neither how to win, nor how to get out.” Fischer writes: “A mistake is not corrected by repeating it over and over again. Perseverance in error does not correct the error; it merely exacerbates it.”

But this is exactly the key trait that has defined the current Bush administration since its early years in office. It’s committed to duplicating failures; instead of abandoning the Iraqi ship, it insists on setting sale in the same tumultuous sea, another defected one.

Indeed, the US is again back on the same self-destruct mode, in the name of national security, regional stability, staying the course‚ and all the rest. Reality cannot be any further from the truth, however. A war against Iran will further exasperate the instability of the region and compromise the security of the United States, at home and abroad. It might also be the end of American military adventurism in the region for some time, but at a price so heavy, so unbearable. If Iraq’s cakewalk has cost the lives of 650,000 Iraqis, how many more must die in broader war before Bush bows to commonsense and brings the grinding wheel of war to a halt?

-Ramzy Baroud’s latest book, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press), is available at Amazon.com and also from the University of Michigan Press. Baroud is a veteran journalist and a human rights advocate at a London-based NGO; he is the editor of PalestineChronicle.com; his website is ramzybaroud.net

The new SADDAM

This is a good example of an article arguing that Saudi Arabia is pursuing an oil war against Iran by keeping oil prices low. The recent middle east visits by Rice fits in with the argument that the US is forming a Sunni Arab Dominated Dictatorships Against the Mullahs (SADDAM) This seems to be a variation on the old divide and rule tactics. Obviously even the limited democratic reforms in Iraq have unleashed forces that oppose the US domination of Iraq and seek to form close relationships with Iran. Now the US is seeking help from its old and undemocratic allies in the middle east and also fanning the flames of sectarian tensions.

The New Saddam
Issandr El Amrani
January 25, 2007


Issandr El Amrani is a Moroccan-American independent journalist based in Cairo. His work about Middle East culture and politics regularly appears in American and British magazines and newspapers. A former editor of two independent liberal weeklies in Egypt, he also publishes a collaborative weblog on the Arab world, www.arabist.net.

Making a renewed appearance in the State of the Union address this year was Iran. Bush set out an agenda that puts the U.S. on a path of confrontation with Iran—the latest installment in the haphazard collection of ideological fads that passes as Middle East policy in Washington these days.

Having made a mess of Iraq, continuing to refuse to play a constructive and even-handed role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and having gotten bored with democracy promotion, the Bush administration now appears to be fanning the flames of sectarian strife region-wide. Since September 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials have made trips to the Middle East to rally the support of what Rice has described as the “moderate mainstream” Arab states against Iran. This group has now been formalized as the “GCC + 2,” meaning the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman) as well as Egypt and Jordan.

I suggest that this new coalition be renamed to something less technocratic: the Sunni Arab-Dominated Dictatorships Against the Mullahs, or SADDAM. I have to confess I was inspired by historical precedent. In the 1980s, some of you may remember, there was another Saddam who proved rather useful against Iran. Saddam invaded Iran without provocation, sparking an eight-year-long war that was one of the 20th century’s deadliest. Along the way, the U.S. and the Arab states listed above provided much in funding, weapons and turning a blind eye when Saddam got carried away and used chemical weapons against Kurds (it did not raise that much of a fuss when he used them against Iranians, either).

By forming SADDAM, the Bush administration hopes to do several things. Firstly, encourage countries with ambivalent policies towards Israel to accept a new regional security arrangement with the Jewish state firmly as its center—the holy grail of the neo-conservatives who, despite reports to the contrary, continue to craft U.S. Middle East policy. (Otherwise, why would Elliott Abrams still have his job?) Secondly, it is securing the support of these countries against Iran, in preparation for a possible strike against its nuclear facilities or some other form of military action, or at least to ensure the recently announced United Nations sanctions against Iran are effective. One tactic is getting the oil-producing SADDAM countries to up production and bring the price of the oil barrel back to under $50, as Saudi Arabia is obviously doing by boycotting calls by fellow OPEC members to cut production.

At stake is limiting one of the biggest effects caused by the administration’s decision to invade Iraq (and subsequently failing to maintain order): the rise of Iran as a regional power. Long under-represented in the regional balance of power for a country of 70 million souls with large oil reserves, Iran has seen two hostile neighboring regimes fall (the Taliban and Saddam Hussein) and has become an important player in the internal politics of Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, where it is supporting political actors who threaten clients of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. There is good reason to worry about Iran’s ascent: The regime has a track record of fanaticism and has made several distasteful pronouncements against Israel and Jews, particularly under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. But before Iran topped the news agenda, most SADDAM countries had begun to recognize that Tehran had an inevitable role to play in regional politics and had begun diplomatic negotiations aimed at formalizing relationships severed since 1979.

The new SADDAM is much more collaborative (and less mercurial) than the old Saddam. The aging autocrats and puppet kings that make it up are getting some nice trade-offs for their support, most notably the abandonment of the Bush administration’s last policy du jour, the “Forward Strategy for Freedom.” You may remember another Bush speech—delivered at his inauguration in 2005—in which he said: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”

Well, with the new SADDAM policy, you get something more along the lines of “I know we previously encouraged you to stand for liberty and all that, but if you live in tyranny and hopelessness we will ignore your oppression and excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will look the other way.”

Just ask Ayman Nour, the Egyptian opposition politician who in 2005 was the darling of the “Arab Spring” but now lingers in jail on trumped-up charges, being denied proper medical treatment for diabetes. Egypt used to top the list of countries under pressure to democratize from Washington—President Bush mentioned it specifically in several speeches—but when Rice visited Cairo earlier this month, the talk was all about Iraq and Iran. There was zilch about democracy, or even Nour’s condition. A few days later, when interviewed by The Washington Post , which has campaigned for Nour and other Egyptian democrats, she meekly protested that the policy still stood, but that “it's not easy and it's not going to be concluded on our watch and there will be ups and downs.”

The new anti-Iranian alliance with SADDAM appears to be deliberately reviving an old divide in the Islamic world between Sunni and Shia Muslims. To convince their populations, which are generally aghast at U.S. policy in Iraq and Palestine, that Iran is the real enemy (although, unlike say Israel, it has never in modern history been the first to attack an Arab country or threatened to use nuclear weapons against them), the SADDAM regimes are engaging in anti-Shia hate-mongering. State-backed clerics and journalists are recuperating the poisonous anti-Shia language typically heard from Iraqi jihadists to lure public support away from Iran and its allies (notably Hezbollah and Hamas, which are widely admired for their resistance to Israel occupation and aggression) and prepare the ground for a confrontation with Tehran.

This policy will have disastrous consequences. Not only will it further discrimination against the already downtrodden Shia minorities in SADDAM countries, but it will encourage the adoption of exactly the kind of intolerant ideas Osama bin Laden and his ilk have tried to spread for decades. The perennial losers will be those Arabs (and Iranians) who struggle for a more tolerant and democratic political culture. We’ve been down this road before.

US buildup in Gulf threatens Iran

The US is stoking up the fires of conflict between Sunnis and Shias. Some sources think that the Saudis are not calling a meeting of OPEC in order to keep prices of oil low and thus stop the flow of hard currency to Iran. Saudi Arabia worries that Shia are gaining influence in the Middle East particularly in Iraq at the expense of Sunnis.



U.S. warns Iran to back down
JIM KRANE
Associated Press
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A second U.S. aircraft carrier strike group now steaming toward the Middle East is Washington's way of warning Iran to back down in its attempts to dominate the region, a top U.S. diplomat said here Tuesday.

Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, ruled out direct negotiations with Iran and said a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran was "not possible" until Iran halts uranium enrichment.

"The Middle East isn't a region to be dominated by Iran. The Gulf isn't a body of water to be controlled by Iran. That's why we've seen the United States station two carrier battle groups in the region," Burns said in an address to the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, an influential think-tank.

"Iran is going to have to understand that the United States will protect its interests if Iran seeks to confront us," Burns continued.

Iran is in a standoff with the West over its defiance of U.N. demands to halt uranium enrichment, which can produce fuel for both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Iran says its atomic program is aimed solely at generating energy, but the United States and some of its allies suspect it is geared toward making weapons. The U.N. imposed limited sanctions on Iran last month.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the United States Tuesday of stirring up conflict between rival Muslim sects to maintain U.S. influence in the Middle East.

"The U.S. intends to cause insecurity and dispute and weaken independent governments in the region to continue with its dominance over the Middle East and achieve its arrogant goals," Ahmadinejad said during a meeting with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem.

"The U.S. and Zionist regime have a conspiracy to stir up conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in order to plunder the wealth of the regional nations," the president said, according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency, or IRNA.

Ahmadinejad said last week that Iran is "ready for anything" in its confrontation with the United States.

Iran conducted missile tests on Monday, the first of five days of military maneuvers southeast of Tehran. The Islamic republic also barred 38 inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog - the International Atomic Energy Agency, prompting fears that it was seeking to restrict access to its facilities.

"This is obviously not a sign of goodwill, nor a sign of willingness to cooperate with the international community," French Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei told reporters Tuesday.

Ali Larijani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, said Tuesday that the decision had been misintepreted and that there had been no change in Iran's cooperation with the IAEA.

"The issue is not the way the media has reflected it," Larijani was reported as saying by IRNA.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said the U.S. buildup in the Gulf was intended to impress on Iran that the four-year war in Iraq has not made America vulnerable.

The American aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis and several accompanying ships are heading toward the Gulf to join an aircraft carrier group already in the region, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Stennis is expected to arrive in late February.

The Stennis's arrival in the Middle East will mark the first time since the U.S.-led Iraq invasion in 2003 that the United States has had two carrier battle groups in the region.

The U.S. Navy said Tuesday that the minesweeper USS Gladiator arrived in the Persian Gulf, one of six such ships - four American, two British - now plying the Gulf for anti-ship mines. U.S. officials have long said Iran was likely to block busy Gulf shipping lanes in a conflict.

Some among the audience of Dubai-based diplomats and analysts complained that American wars in the Middle East were already threatening the region's stability and asked Burns to sort out Iraq and the Israel-Palestinian conflict before turning attention to Iran.

"What we are not interested in is another war in the region," Mohammed al-Naqbi, who heads the Gulf Negotiations Center, told Burns. "Iraq is your problem, not the problem of the Arabs. You destroyed a country that had institutions. You handed that country to Iran. Now you are crying to Europe and the Arabs to help you out of this mess."