A Very Dangerous New Year

The first two or three months of 2007 represent a dangerous opening for an escalation of war in the Middle East, as George W. Bush will be tempted to "double-down" his gamble in Iraq by joining with Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair to strike at Syria and Iran, intelligence sources say. President Bush's goal would be to transcend the bloody quagmire bogging down U.S. forces in Iraq by achieving "regime change" in Syria and by destroying nuclear facilities in Iran, two blows intended to weaken Islamic militants in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. The Israeli army and air force would carry the brunt of the new fighting albeit with the support of beefed-up U.S. ground and naval forces in the Middle East, the sources said. Bush is now considering a "surge" in U.S. troop levels in Iraq from about 140,000 to as many as 170,000. He also has dispatched a second aircraft carrier group to the coast of Iran. So far, however, Bush has confronted stiff opposition from the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff to the plan for raising troop levels in Iraq, partly because the generals don't think it makes sense to commit more troops without a specific military mission. But it's unclear how much the generals know about the expanded-war agenda which has been discussed sometimes in one-on-one meetings among the principals - Bush, Olmert and Blair - according to intelligence sources.

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  thanks to wood s lot

The Great Game on a razor's edge

The accidental killing of Alexander Ivanov, a Kyrgyz fuel-truck driver, by Corporal Zachary Hatfield, a US serviceman, at the Manas Air Base on the outskirts of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek in December is threatening to snowball into a first-rate crisis for the United States' regional policy in Central Asia. Manas is the lone US military base in all of Central Asia - close to the Chinese border of Xinjiang. Curiously, this was also how the year 2006 began, as Washington was grappling with the call made by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) for a timeline for the withdrawal of the US military presence in Central Asia. In a nationally televised address, Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev called for reviewing the Manas base agreement with the US. The Kyrgyz Parliament passed a resolution that given the "negative perception of the American image among our country's population", Bakiyev should examine the continuance of the base. The Foreign Ministry made a demarche with the US that Hatfield shouldn't leave until the Kyrgyz due process of law took its course. This is rhetoric out of Latin America. Yet Bakiyev had only come to power on the crest of the US-backed "Tulip Revolution" of March 2005. But US-funded Kyrgyz "civil society" groups are nowadays arrayed against him on account of his increasingly pronounced foreign-policy leanings toward Russia and China. They turned rowdyish in November, and humiliated him, forcing on him a new constitution curtailing his presidential powers. That is to say, Washington must now seek Bakiyev's help while backstage it could be funding and instigating political activists bent on overthrowing him. Bakiyev's overthrow may help the US firm up its grip on Manas, but today his helping hand is useful for preserving US interests. Nothing could be more surreal. Nothing would so vividly epitomize the complexities of the geopolitics of Central Asia.

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