Analysts Fear Disaster in U.S. Course

Alarms are definitely on the rise here.

And it's not just because the British police arrested 21 people who were allegedly plotting to bomb up to 10 jetliners between London and the United States in mid-flight over the Atlantic Ocean. Although that probably didn't help.

It's more the sense that the growing number of crises in the "new Middle East," proudly midwifed by the administration of President George W. Bush, is rapidly spinning out of control with potentially catastrophic consequences for the entire region and beyond.

The ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah -- not to imminent expansion of Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon if it does not get a U.N. Security Council resolution to its liking -- has, by virtually all accounts, inflamed and radicalised the Islamic world and rendered a larger regional conflagration much more likely.

At the same time, Wednesday's report that an unprecedented 1,815 bodies, 90 percent victims of violence, were brought to the Baghdad's morgue last month -- eclipsing the previous record established in June by some 250 corpses -- appeared to confirm the increasingly widespread view here that Iraq is moving headlong towards civil war, if it isn't already in one, as many regional experts have contended for some time.

"Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency," noted Washington's former U.N. Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, in an uncharacteristically alarming column in Thursday's Washington Post.

The column's title, "The Guns of August," was a reference to a book about the diplomatic follies and indecisive battles that launched Europe into a devastating world war in 1914.

"A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay," Holbrooke warned. "...The combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation."

Among other things, noted Holbrooke, a top candidate for secretary of state if Democrats had won the presidency in 2000 or 2004, Turkey is threatening to invade northern Iraq; the world's largest anti-Israel demonstrations are taking place in downtown Baghdad; Syria may yet be pulled into the Lebanon war; Afghanistan is under growing threat from a resurgent Taliban; and India is threatening about punitive action against Pakistan for its alleged involvement in the recent train bombings in Bombay.

Particularly alarming to Holbrooke, as to a steadily growing number of Republican realists and other members of the traditional U.S. foreign policy elite, is the apparent complacency of the Bush administration in the face of these events.

Indeed, since the outbreak of the Lebanon crisis four weeks ago, a succession of former top Republican policy-makers -- including Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to former presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush; the younger Bush's former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage; and Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass -- has called publicly for a major reassessment of U.S. Middle East policy and its conduct of the "global war on terror."

Their common message is the necessity of pressing Israel for a quick ceasefire in Lebanon, engaging directly with Syria and Iran on both Lebanon and Iraq, and restarting a serious peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. It has been echoed by leading Democrats, including former President Jimmy Carter; his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski; and former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, as well as by Holbrooke himself.

To these appeals, however -- as well as to the worsening of the twin crises themselves -- the administration has appeared largely deaf. "There is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognise how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions," Holbrooke noted.