Bush White House planning a six-year escalation of war with Iran

I found this on Raw Story:

The escalation of US military planning on Iran is only the latest chess move in a six-year push within the Bush Administration to attack Iran, a RAW STORY investigation has found.

While Iran was named a part of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in 2002, efforts to ignite a confrontation with Iran date back long before the post-9/11 war on terror. Presently, the Administration is trumpeting claims that Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than the CIA’s own analysis shows and positing Iranian influence in Iraq’s insurgency, but efforts to destabilize Iran have been conducted covertly for years, often using members of Congress or non-government actors in a way reminiscent of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal.

The motivations for an Iran strike were laid out as far back as 1992. In classified defense planning guidance – written for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney by then-Pentagon staffers I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, World Bank Chief Paul Wolfowitz, and ambassador-nominee to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad – Cheney’s aides called for the United States to assume the position of lone superpower and act preemptively to prevent the emergence of even regional competitors. The draft document was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post and caused an uproar among Democrats and many in George H. W. Bush’s Administration.

In September 2000, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) issued a report titled “Rebuilding America's Defenses,” which espoused similar positions to the 1992 draft and became the basis for the Bush-Cheney Administration's foreign policy. Libby and Wolfowitz were among the participants in this new report; Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent figures in the Bush administration were PNAC members.

“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” the report read. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. . . . We cannot allow North Korea, Iran, Iraq or similar states to undermine American leadership, intimidate American allies or threaten the American homeland itself.”

This approach became official US military policy during the current Bush Administration. It was starkly on display yesterday when Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns noted a second aircraft carrier strike force headed for the Persian Gulf, saying, "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."

It is like the PNAC neocons didn't just want to go to war with Iraq, but also with Iran. The PNAC neocons have been planning this thing for six years--perhaps even longer with their desire to remake the United States as not just the sole super-power in the world, but also an imperial power in the Middle East. They refuse to engage in any type of negotiations or diplomacy--it is either submit to our demands, or we will destroy you. The PNAC neocons have remade the United States into the Middle East School Bully. What they don't understand is that they can't get away with this forever--someone is going to stand up and punch that school bully hard in the nose. And right now, that somebody is going to be Iran. This is a war we can not win.

Read the entire Raw Story article. It is disturbing. You might also want to check out the timeline.

Troops Authorized to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq

I don't know what to say here. This is off The Washington Post:

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The "catch and release" policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran's regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country's nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

"There were no costs for the Iranians," said one senior administration official. "They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back."

Three officials said that about 150 Iranian intelligence officers, plus members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Command, are believed to be active inside Iraq at any given time. There is no evidence the Iranians have directly attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, intelligence officials said.

But, for three years, the Iranians have operated an embedding program there, offering operational training, intelligence and weaponry to several Shiite militias connected to the Iraqi government, to the insurgency and to the violence against Sunni factions. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, told the Senate recently that the amount of Iranian-supplied materiel used against U.S. troops in Iraq "has been quite striking."

"Iran seems to be conducting a foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism," Hayden said.

The new "kill or capture" program was authorized by President Bush in a meeting of his most senior advisers last fall, along with other measures meant to curtail Iranian influence from Kabul to Beirut and, ultimately, to shake Iran's commitment to its nuclear efforts. Tehran insists that its nuclear program is peaceful, but the United States and other nations say it is aimed at developing weapons.

[....]

The White House has authorized a widening of what is known inside the intelligence community as the "Blue Game Matrix" -- a list of approved operations that can be carried out against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. And U.S. officials are preparing international sanctions against Tehran for holding several dozen al-Qaeda fighters who fled across the Afghan border in late 2001. They plan more aggressive moves to disrupt Tehran's funding of the radical Palestinian group Hamas and to undermine Iranian interests among Shiites in western Afghanistan.

In Iraq, U.S. troops now have the authority to target any member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, as well as officers of its intelligence services believed to be working with Iraqi militias. The policy does not extend to Iranian civilians or diplomats. Though U.S. forces are not known to have used lethal force against any Iranian to date, Bush administration officials have been urging top military commanders to exercise the authority.

Talk about an escalation by the Bush administration against Iran. We're sending another carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf. We've attacked an Iranian consulate in Northern Iraq--which was authorized by President Bush. And finally, President Bush has made two ultimatums against Iran--once during the president's surge speech, and again during the SOTU speech.

Here's President Bush's ultimatum against Iran in his surge speech:

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenge. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.

That sounds like a declaration of war against Iran. Here's the ultimatum in Bush's SOTU speech:

These men are not given to idle words, and they are just one camp in the Islamist radical movement. In recent times, it has also become clear that we face an escalating danger from Shia extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East. Many are known to take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah -- a group second only to al-Qaida in the American lives it has taken.

The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat. But whatever slogans they chant, when they slaughter the innocent, they have the same wicked purposes. They want to kill Americans ... kill democracy in the Middle East ... and gain the weapons to kill on an even more horrific scale.

In the sixth year since our nation was attacked, I wish I could report to you that the dangers have ended. They have not. And so it remains the policy of this government to use every lawful and proper tool of intelligence, diplomacy, law enforcement, and military action to do our duty, to find these enemies, and to protect the American people.

This is not as overt as the president's surge speech, but still the message is clear--the United States will probably attack Iran unless Iran dismantles its nuclear weapons program. In the SOTU speech, Bush linked the Shiite insurgents to taking orders from Iran. Therefore, the U.S. has the right to take the Global War on Terror against Iran. And now we have this latest WaPost story saying that U.S. troops can now fire and kill Iranian operatives inside of Iraq. While the Bush White House claims that this order applies to Iran's Revolutionary Guard, intelligence officers, and not Iranian civilians and diplomats, who can tell if a particular Iranian is a member of the Revolutionary Guard or a diplomat when that Iranian is dressed in civilian clothes? It seems to me that this order is more of a shoot and kill first, then ask questions later.

This gets even better. Continuing in the WaPost:

Senior administration officials said the policy is based on the theory that Tehran will back down from its nuclear ambitions if the United States hits it hard in Iraq and elsewhere, creating a sense of vulnerability among Iranian leaders. But if Iran responds with escalation, it has the means to put U.S. citizens and national interests at greater risk in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Officials said Hayden counseled the president and his advisers to consider a list of potential consequences, including the possibility that the Iranians might seek to retaliate by kidnapping or killing U.S. personnel in Iraq.

Two officials said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, though a supporter of the strategy, is concerned about the potential for errors, as well as the ramifications of a military confrontation between U.S. and Iranian troops on the Iraqi battlefield.

In meetings with Bush's other senior advisers, officials said, Rice insisted that the defense secretary appoint a senior official to personally oversee the program to prevent it from expanding into a full-scale conflict. Rice got the oversight guarantees she sought, though it remains unclear whether senior Pentagon officials must approve targets on a case-by-case basis or whether the oversight is more general.

The departments of Defense and State referred all requests for comment on the Iran strategy to the National Security Council, which declined to address specific elements of the plan and would not comment on some intelligence matters.

So apparently Hayden of the CIA was a big proponent of this plan--especially if American forces can raid Iranian consulates and gather intelligence papers regarding Iranian operations in Iraq. Senior administration officials said the policy is based on the theory that Tehran will back down from its nuclear ambitions if the United States hits it hard in Iraq and elsewhere, creating a sense of vulnerability among Iranian leaders. I certainly have to wonder whether those senior administration officials were the PNAC neocons, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. These guys seem so intent on confronting Iran to abandon its nuclear program--and Iran is not backing down. But it gets better. Condi Rice is now starting to worry that such a program of American soldiers being authorized to kill Iranians might just cause a confrontation between the United States and Iran--but she's still supportive of the program. So we have some unnamed senior official appointed to oversee the program as a means for avoiding a full-scale conflict. Now here's the real fun part:

Advocates of the new policy -- some of whom are in the NSC, the vice president's office, the Pentagon and the State Department -- said that only direct and aggressive efforts can shatter Iran's growing influence. A less confident Iran, with fewer cards, may be more willing to cut the kind of deal the Bush administration is hoping for on its nuclear program.

We can pretty well guess who the advocate of this "kill Iranians" strategy is. Vice President Cheney is one. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley is probably another. Wolfowitz could be a third, or perhaps even Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The WaPost provides even more Bush administration names to this policy:

The decision to use lethal force against Iranians inside Iraq began taking shape last summer, when Israel was at war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Officials said a group of senior Bush administration officials who regularly attend the highest-level counterterrorism meetings agreed that the conflict provided an opening to portray Iran as a nuclear-ambitious link between al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and the death squads in Iraq.

Among those involved in the discussions, beginning in August, were deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams [Another PNAC member], NSC counterterrorism adviser Juan Zarate, the head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, representatives from the Pentagon and the vice president's office, and outgoing State Department counterterrorism chief Henry A. Crumpton.

The neocons are really pushing this escalation against Iran. And they are doing it in the most sickening way:

At the time, Bush publicly emphasized diplomacy as his preferred path for dealing with Iran. Standing before the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 19, Bush spoke directly to the Iranian people: "We look to the day when you can live in freedom, and America and Iran can be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace."

Two weeks later, Crumpton flew from Washington to U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa for a meeting with Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East. A principal reason for the visit, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the discussion, was to press Abizaid to prepare for an aggressive campaign against Iranian intelligence and military operatives inside Iraq.

Information gleaned through the "catch and release" policy expanded what was once a limited intelligence community database on Iranians in Iraq. It also helped to avert a crisis between the United States and the Iraqi government over whether U.S. troops should be holding Iranians, several officials said, and dampened the possibility of Iranians directly targeting U.S. personnel in retaliation.

"This has little to do with Iraq. It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It is purely political," the official said. The official expressed similar views about other new efforts aimed at Iran, suggesting that the United States is escalating toward an unnecessary conflict to shift attention away from Iraq and to blame Iran for the United States' increasing inability to stanch the violence there.

But some officials within the Bush administration say that targeting Iran's Revolutionary Guard Command, and specifically a Guard unit known as the Quds Force, should be as much a priority as fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Quds Force is considered by Western intelligence to be directed by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to support Iraqi militias, Hamas and Hezbollah.

In interviews, two senior administration officials separately compared the Tehran government to the Nazis and the Guard to the "SS." They also referred to Guard members as "terrorists." Such a formal designation could turn Iran's military into a target of what Bush calls a "war on terror," with its members potentially held as enemy combatants or in secret CIA detention.

President Bush was originally open towards diplomacy (also known as negotiations) with Iran regarding Iran's nuclear program. But the neocons didn't like that. So the neocons have convinced President Bush that a better policy of escalation against Iran was preferable to diplomacy--specifically comparing the Iranian government to the Nazis, and the Revolutionary Guard to the "SS." Where have we seen that strategy before? Iraq? Saddam Hussein compared to Adolf Hitler? But it is not about stopping Iran's nuclear program:

"This has little to do with Iraq. It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It is purely political," the official said. The official expressed similar views about other new efforts aimed at Iran, suggesting that the United States is escalating toward an unnecessary conflict to shift attention away from Iraq and to blame Iran for the United States' increasing inability to stanch the violence there.

It is all political. It is all about pushing Iran's buttons to start a war with the United States. It is all about creating a third war in the Middle East, to shift the American public's attention away from the failed war in Iraq so they can support this new war in Iran, and perhaps even salvage Bush's presidential legacy. We have warmongers in this Bush White House. They will do whatever they can to keep whatever control the U.S. has in Iraq--especially regarding the oil reserves--and will attack whatever nation they can in order to keep U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. There will be a U.S. war against Iran. Iran will not back down against the U.S. This war will take place once the Stennis carrier group is positioned in the Persian Gulf area--perhaps in early March.

It will become a total disaster for the United States.

Is the Bush administration planning an all-out war with Iran?

A general view of a uranium processing site in Isfahan, 340 km (211 miles) south of Tehran, in this March 30, 2005 file photo. U.S. contingency planning for military action against Iran's nuclear program goes beyond limited strikes and would effectively unleash a war against the country, a former U.S. intelligence analyst said on Friday. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi.

I found this through Americablog, so I went to the original Reuters source:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. contingency planning for military action against Iran's nuclear program goes beyond limited strikes and would effectively unleash a war against the country, a former U.S. intelligence analyst said on Friday.

"I've seen some of the planning ... You're not talking about a surgical strike," said Wayne White, who was a top Middle East analyst for the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research until March 2005.

"You're talking about a war against Iran" that likely would destabilize the Middle East for years, White told the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank.

"We're not talking about just surgical strikes against an array of targets inside Iran. We're talking about clearing a path to the targets" by taking out much of the Iranian Air Force, Kilo submarines, anti-ship missiles that could target commerce or U.S. warships in the Gulf, and maybe even Iran's ballistic missile capability, White said.

"I'm much more worried about the consequences of a U.S. or Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear infrastructure," which would prompt vigorous Iranian retaliation, he said, than civil war in Iraq, which could be confined to that country.

President George W. Bush has stressed he is seeking a diplomatic solution to the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

But he has not taken the military option off the table and his recent rhetoric, plus tougher financial sanctions and actions against Iranian involvement in Iraq, has revived talk in Washington about a possible U.S. attack on Iran.

I will be honest here. I don't know if President Bush is that certifiably insane enough to start an all-out war with Iran, or not. I certainly can't trust anything the Bush administration says because I've heard so many lies, marketing and PR-spin from this administration. And since the war in Iraq has been a disaster, that events in Iraq and the Middle East have spiraled out of control for the PNAC officials inside this administration, and that George Bush is now worried about his presidential legacy, I can see this Bush White House starting a new war with Iran in order to shift our attention away from the failed disaster of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

That scares me.

Bush administration rooting for North Korea nuclear test

This is just insane. I found this through Think Progress, then went back to the Washington Post story regarding Secretary of State Condi Rice's view that the North Korean nuclear test allowed China to engage in the debate and crisis. This little paragraph was buried deep in the WaPost story:

Before North Korea announced it had detonated a nuclear device, some senior officials even said they were quietly rooting for a test, believing that would finally clarify the debate within the administration.

This is just insane! Bush administration officials rooting for this North Korean nuclear test? This little paragraph brings up a whole host of questions regarding the Bush administration's policy on North Korea. What is the Bush administration's policy on North Korean nukes? From what I can gather, the administration has been extremely confrontational regarding North Korea, both in refusing to negotiate directly with the North Koreans and in pushing the idea of overthrowing the North Korean government. It is no wonder the North Koreans went ahead with their bomb production and the subsequently failed test. My second question would be where the division is within the Bush administration on this policy? Who sided with the neocon views of non-negotiating with the North Koreans, and who sided with a more moderating stance--perhaps similar to the Clinton administration's approach toward the North Koreans? And finally, who exactly were rooting for these North Korean tests? I'd be curious to hear the names of these senior administration officials rooting for North Korean nukes.

But there is more here. This little paragraph shows the complete failure of the Bush administration's policy on North Korea. The Bush administration rejected any sort of negotiations with North Korea, rejected the Clinton administration's Agreed Framework program, for a fantasy idea of isolating North Korea and hopefully prompting an overthrow of Kim Jong II. The Bush administration decided to invade Iraq on the premise of fantasy Iraqi WMDs, while ignoring the real threat of North Korean WMDs. In a sense this little paragraph shows a complete division within the Bush administration between officials who may have wanted to embark on a policy of real politics with North Korea to obtain measurable results in limiting North Korea's nuclear ambitions, and the neocons who dreamed an ideology of extreme American imperialism. This debate between the real politics and ideologues never went away.

North Korea's Nuclear Test

This annotated commercial satellite image released by The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington on October 10, 2006 shows the suspected nuclear test site near the town of Chik-tong in North Korea as seen in a satellite image acquired from Digital Globe. The image, made by a Digital Globe satellite on September 17, 2006, depicts the suspected suspected tunnel entrance and support buildings as well as a VIP helipad and housing around what is believed to be the North Korean test site. REUTERS/Digital Globe-ISIS/Handout

Well, the North Koreans have done it--they have finally conducted their own underground test of a nuclear weapon. This is off The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Monday, Oct. 9 — North Korea said Sunday night that it had set off its first nuclear test, becoming the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.

The test came just two days after the country was warned by the United Nations Security Council that the action could lead to severe consequences.

What is especially interesting here is the explosion was the equivalent of 550 tons of TNT:

North Korea's nuclear test was equivalent to 550 tons of TNT, a state-run South Korean geological institute said. That is relatively small compared to the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, which was equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT.

The real issue here isn't whether or not the North Koreans have successfully tested a nuclear device--we've known for years that the North Koreans have been actively building a nuclear bomb. The real problem here is that for six years, the North Koreans have been given what amounts to a free pass in their nuclear weapons research. Instead of a North Korean successful test of a nuclear weapon, what we really have here is a Bush administration's failure to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This is a Bush administration failure in ignoring North Korea's real nuclear ambitions for the fantasy Iraqi WMDs and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This has been a failure of the Bush administration for ignoring the stockpile of Russian nuclear weapons material and for cutting the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program's budget. The Cooperative Threat Reduction was a simple concept which allowed the United States to purchase Russia's nuclear weapons material, then safely secure it either in Russia or the U.S. However, the Bush administration will cut the Cooperative Threat Reduction by 10 percent--$372.1 million from a fiscal 2006 funding of $415.5 million. Even the funding for diverting Russian nuclear scientists away from weapons programs into more useful programs is being cut:

The budget request includes $28.5 million for the Global Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention program, which seeks to redirect the expertise of former weapons scientists in Iraq, Libya, and the former Soviet Union toward civilian pursuits. The request is 29 percent below current spending of $39.6 mil lion. NNSA says the lower total reflects diminished program activity in the Russian cities of Sarov and Snezhinsk.

The budget request for the International Nuclear Materials Protection, Control and Accounting (MPC&A;) program, which seeks to secure vulnerable nuclear weapons and weapons-usable materials, is $413.2 million, a 3.3 percent reduction from the 2006 appropriation of $427 million.

The Bush administration has pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, so that President Bush can create his own flawed missile defense system. The Bush administration has ignored the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, in favor of developing and testing a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons. And while the United States is still a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Bush administration has pretty much ignored the NPT--they've ignored nuclear disarmament, and they have ignored the pledge of not using nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear country--namely Iran.
In one sense, this has been a PNAC neocon's systematic long-term approach towards destroying international nuclear non-proliferation commitments and disarmaments in favor of a U.S. arms race for a new generation of nuclear weapons. The problem here is that the destruction of these international agreements on nuclear proliferation and the next generation of American nuclear weapons will not make the U.S. any safer--it will not stop a possible terrorist organization for acquiring weapons-grade uranium or plutonium from Russia, or the Russian scientific expertise for sale to North Korea, Iran, Libya, or any other country that wishes to possess nukes. This will not stop the North Koreans from conducting further nuclear tests to refine their bomb-making abilities, nor will it stop South Korea or Japan from embarking on their own nuclear weapons development. President Bush's vaunted Missile Defense System will not stop a terrorist organization, or a country, from smuggling a nuclear weapon into the United States--all it would take is to place the nuclear bomb on a cargo ship heading towards an American port. Once the ship reaches port, you then set off the nuke.

There is a hypocrisy in this Bush administration—a hypocrisy of saying one thing, while doing another. The Bush administration demands that North Korea gives up its nuclear development while at the same time the administration has been embarking on designing and testing a new generation of nuclear warheads. This Bush administration demands that North Korea enter into negotiations with not just the U.S., but also with China and Russia at the table in a multi-national session, rather than the bilateral session that North Korea favors with the U.S. And yet in Iraq, the Middle East, and pretty much the rest of the world, the U.S. has embarked on their own unilateral foreign policy—rejecting multinational negotiations and agreements. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has certainly prompted Iran to quicken their own pace of nuclear weapons development. The other nations of the world view this hypocrisy of “Do as I say, and not as I do,” and have concluded that they too can behave as irrational and hypocritical as the U.S. is currently behaving.

These are the real failures of this Bush administration.

British Leader Announces Plans to Resign in Next Year

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is OUT! This is from The New York Times:

LONDON, Sept. 7--Bending to pressure, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced today that he would leave office within the next 12 months, heralding the end of a remarkable three terms in office during which he has lifted the nationÂ’s mood at home but plunged it into unwelcome wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His pronouncement meant that, some time around or before next summer, Mr. Blair will resign the leadership of the Labor Party and make way for Gordon Brown, his finance minister, to take over as prime minister. For much of this week, Britain'’s political village has been gripped with the spectacle of a brutal behind-the-scenes power struggle between the two men. On Wednesday, eight junior aides quit Mr. BlairÂ’s camp, leaving the sense of a land in crisis.

In what seemed a carefully choreographed series of pronouncements, Mr. Brown first made a separate announcement today, drawing back from a showdown with his onetime ally. "“I will support him in the decision he makes," Mr. Brown said.

It was not clear whether the absence of a clear timetable would satisfy a restive Labor Party, many of whose legislators have been clamoring for an exact date for him to leave before local elections next May. Mr. Blair, who has said he will not seek a fourth term, has been desperate to set the conditions of his departure, anxious to mold a legacy of achievement to offset the profound unpopularity he has garnered from his close alliance with President Bush in the Iraq war.

Tony Blair staked his government on the Bush administration's war in Iraq. He blindly followed Bush and the neocons into the war, has gotten bogged down in a costly occupation in a country that is in the throes of civil war, and is now reaping the destruction of his own government with the falling public opinion polls and the mass resignations of key aides. What is even more amazing is the profound legacy of his previous accomplishments will be overshadowed by the disaster of Iraq. Consider this from the Times:

Mr. Blair took power in 1997 on a wave of euphoria that built as he struck the 1998 Northern Ireland peace agreement and, with Mr. Brown running the economy, opened the country to a remarkable period of low unemployment, low interest rates and high employment.

In foreign affairs, he built a close relationship with President Bill Clinton and took a prominent role in the Kosovo war, a forerunner of his interventionist policies in the Muslim world. He was returned to office with another landslide in June 2001.

But it was on Sept 11, 2001, that Mr. Blair'’s tenor and style changed. He became a close ally of President Bush first in Afghanistan then in Iraq--a war that was deeply unpopular among many Britons, including Muslims who argued that the vision of British troops fighting in Islamic countries as allies of the United States exposed the country to terrorist attack. His handling of the Iraq invasion, moreover, cost him the trust of many Britons.

In the end, Tony Blair has no one to blame but himself for getting Brtain into this mess.